To evaluate different strategies for improving students' comprehension skills, particularly their inference ability, 42 fifth grade students identified as good or average readers were placed into one of three groups for an eight-week instructional period. Students in one group, the Content and Structure group, received systematic attention, story…

A study was conducted to gain insight into the question answering abilities of good and poor readers by comparing how well they answered questions when their prior knowledge was at two different levels (high, low) and in four different states. These states of prior knowledge consisted of the ways in which answers to the questions were stored in…

Replicates a 1977 study and reaches similar conclusions: specifically, that schematic interpretations have a high relationship to prior knowledge. (FL)

Concludes that sixth-grade students taught with methods that used a structured overview to activate background knowledge, the cloze procedure to develop an inferential thinking strategy, and a self-monitoring checklist to maintain the strategy increased their inferential comprehension skills as measured by both immediate and delayed transfer…

A study investigated the ability of fifth grade above and below average readers to use mental imagery in reading familiar and unfamiliar text. The subjects, 80 fifth grade students reading either above or below grade level, were placed into either an experimental or a control group. All subjects individually read one familiar and one unfamiliar…

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in schematic aspects of narratives would enhance children's knowledge of story constituents and their interrelationships and to assess the effect of instruction in narrative schema on the reading comprehension of average and below average readers. Subjects were 20 fourth grade students who had been…

A study was conducted to determine the benefits of an approach to teaching inferential skills that combined an explicit attempt to sensitize children to why and how one should draw inferences to prior knowledge with substantial practice in drawing such inferences during story discussions. Subjects were 20 good and 20 poor fourth grade readers who…

A study was conducted to examine the influence of topic familiarity on good and poor readers' ability to identify and use important information in expository texts. Subjects were 56 eighth grade students and 37 adults. After indicating their familiarity with the topics of eight experimental passages using J. P. Guilford's method of paired…

With the use of verbal report strategies, a study was conducted to examine (1) the types of comprehension strategies readers use to process familiar and less familiar texts and (2) the differential use of think aloud strategies by average and below average readers. Subjects were 15 tenth grade male students in upstate New York. Two weeks prior to…

A two-part study investigated the effects of a text adjunct on poor readers' recall and comprehension. The text adjunct, a thematic organizer, was designed to define explicitly the central theme of a passage, relate the theme to students' prior knowledge, and provide cohesion among the ideas of the passage to accommodate text structure. Subjects…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) creativity as a mediating variable in inferential reading comprehension; (2) teacher questioning and student response interaction during portions of reading…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) factual, elaborative, and inferential levels of text processing; (2) the effect of explicitly and implicitly presented rhetorical functions on the…