Working under the hypothesis that a child's concept of a story and his or her concept of the task of narration used to tap comprehension emerge first in social interaction, a methodology was created for studying the process of development from dependent functioning in social interaction to independent functioning based on L. Vygotsky's theoretical…

Studies how children negotiate the meaning of literature by examining how they responded when given the opportunity to retell a story directly after hearing it. (DF)

AN ADDRESS FOR CLASSROOM TEACHERS IS PRESENTED WHICH CONSIDERS THE NATURE OF COMPREHENSION AND THE PROCESSES INVOLVED IN TEACHING CHILDREN TO COMPREHEND WHAT THEY READ. A REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH ON COMPREHENSION SINCE 1960 IS GIVEN. THE FOLLOWING TOPICS ARE DISCUSSED--THE PROCESS OF COMPREHENDING, THE KINDS OF COMPREHENSION, THE RELATIONSHIP…

To determine whether the Frayer Model of Concept Attainment, which uses a systemic procedure for defining concepts and which structures materials in a manner designed to facilitate comprehension for both good and poor readers, is superior to a method of defining concepts employed by many social studies textbooks, a study involving 360 ninth…

The literature of reading theory and research suggests a number of key factors involved in the comprehension process. In simplest terms, comprehension is the process by which an individual actively generates meaning from some linguistic input. Five factors of reading comprehension have been identified through research: vocabulary knowledge, the…

The theme of this report is that recent theory and research related to the cognitive domain of children's comprehension of stories have implications for the social domain of children's understanding of interpersonal interaction, since there are important overlaps between the abilities necessary to comprehend stories about social events and those…

Explores the aspects of memory that allow people to remember what they have comprehended from reading. (MKM)

Changing function-type responses to classification-type responses in poor readers will result in improved comprehension. (RB)

Describes study which found that young children do not have an adequate concept of what constitutes a spoken word, which may partially explain why some children have difficulty making sense out of instruction aimed at helping them to process print. (JM)

The two reported studies examined children's approaches to and success in conceptualizing a literal main idea in reading. The first study examined elementary pupils' ability to formulate a main idea for brief, carefully controlled paragraphs written with one specific but unstated main idea. The study revealed that although subjects' grade…

Discusses the nature of cohesive relationships and the contribution of cohesion to comprehension in determining the role of cohesion in written text. (DF)

Describes the results of a preliminary investigation of skapa, a simple, three-step procedure for analyzing cognitive aspects of skimming and speed reading. (Author)

Indicates that both good and poor readers who utilized material organized according to the guidelines established by the Frayer Model of Concept Attainment received significantly higher comprehension scores than did good and poor readers who employed material organized according to the textbook approach. (RB)

In an examination of elementary school children's notions of reading, 1,122 first through sixth graders were individually interviewed. Each child was asked to define reading, and their responses were placed into four categories: those which were vague or irrelevant, those which focused on classroom procedure or the educational value of reading,…

The effect of supplementary questions on learning from textual materials was investigated in a sample of 94 college juniors. Each subject was given a 1,500-word passage describing the concept of measurement. One treatment group was asked to identify characteristics of the concept; another was asked to identify examples from the text; a third…