State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi…

This report contains the best national data available to provide a reliable and comprehensive overview of American reading today. While it incorporates some statistics from the National Endowment for the Arts' 2004 report, "Reading at Risk," this new study contains vastly more data from numerous sources. Although most of this information is…

In an updated edition, this book is intended to provide a solid, but accessible, introduction to what is known about the psychology of reading. The book is not aimed at cognitive psychologists, but at those who have had an academic background equivalent to the introductory course in psychology. The guiding purpose of the book is to address what…

It was reasoned that readers who have difficulty processing intersentence relationships to discover main ideas of paragraphs would be among those identified as weak comprehenders by a standardized test measure. To test the hypotheses related to this premise, 48 community college students designated as good and poor comprehenders on main idea items…

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." This detailed study showed that Americans in almost every demographic group were reading fiction, poetry, and drama--and books in general--at significantly lower rates than 10 or 20 years earlier. The declines were steepest among…

Two studies investigated the relationships between readability, prior knowledge, and interest in the material being read. In the first study, 169 college freshmen read cloze passages of materials from the Nelson-Denny Reading Tests, then one week later read the whole passages and completed the related multiple choice questions. A control group…

The effectiveness of different frequencies of summarization during studying and processing prose passages was compared. The 48 college students in the study were equally divided into a control group (normal study techniques), a frequent summarization group that created four noncumulative summaries at equally spaced intervals throughout the passage…

A study was undertaken (1) to determine if a relationship existed between preadolescents' levels of reading comprehension as defined by T. C. Barrett's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and their levels of moral development according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stage sequence and (2) to discover if females demonstrated higher levels of reading…

A study was carried out to discover if readers responded affectively to the connotative meanings of certain words and if better readers were more or less responsive to these connotations than were average or poor readers. A total of 120 students in five intact eleventh grade classes completed semantic differential scales to measure both individual…

The "primacy of reading" hypothesis as the explanation for the high correlation between children's competencies in literacy and numeracy is rejected in this paper. Instead, a "primacy of speech perception" hypothesis is examined. It is suggested that analysis-by-synthesis speech recognition procedures are acquired in early childhood and that the…

A study examined the effectiveness of an integrated language arts instructional format for teaching reading compared with the effectiveness of the typical traditional reading program. The study investigated the effectiveness of approaches that are representative of both viewpoints of the reading process (i.e., word recognition and the construction…