A study tested the hypothesis that readers continually evaluate the informational content of text in terms of its relevance to processing goals and congruence with existing knowledge, and that they prioritize this information in terms of its strategic importance to the task at hand, integrating it with existing schemata when it is compatible.…

Defining reading as a constructive process involving an interaction of the reader, the text, and the context, this paper offers a model of student cognitive processing that incorporates research in reading, thinking, teaching, and instructional materials. The first section of the paper provides the theoretical context for developing the model,…

As measured by responses to a main-idea essay question and by written summaries of two passages, students' ability to abstract the macrostructure of problem/solution text read independently was improved by the use of structure training. (FL)

Reports on a study showing that teachers' understanding of learning and the age of children affect children's comprehension styles. (EL)

Challenges the widely endorsed practice of activating relevant knowledge prior to reading. Outlines a perspectival (perspective-relative) view of reading and suggests that this view provides a means to make coherent sense of interpretations. Concludes that having specific knowledge is not the main desideratum in interpreting texts--the main…

Concludes that both able and less able eighth grade readers who read text versions in which key concepts and the relations between them had been explained thoroughly learned significantly more word meanings than did students who read any of the other versions. (FL)

Reports on participant-observation in a third- and fourth-grade classroom in which students learned to read science texts with both "efferent" and "aesthetic" reading processes. (HTH)

Meta-analysis was used to assess the effect of metacognitive instruction on reading comprehension. Twenty studies from the reading research literature were compiled and quantitatively synthesized. Results affirm the effectiveness of metacognitive strategies, especially for junior high school students. Textual inconsistency awareness,…

Forty-eight college students participated in a study that (1) explored the degree to which the reader response technique developed by W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein to study artificial texts could be applied to natural texts, and (2) compared texts written over a wide time period and from two different literary traditions (six American and…

Predicated on the assumption that many of the problems exhibited by learning disabled children arise from difficulties they have in processing information, the program of research described in this paper was undertaken to (1) identify reading comprehension difficulties that are due to disorders in the reader, and (2) design and test effective…

To examine the role of phonetic code in memory, a study investigated the use of phonetic recoding strategies in fifth and sixth graders identified as good and poor readers. Subjects--120 students with IQ scores in the average range--were divided evenly between both grades. Thirty subjects from each grade who scored above the 50th percentile on the…

Critiques current understandings of children's motivation for literacy learning, and argues for a reconceptualization of motivation that centers on the learner as agent in the social construction of meaning. Uses vignettes and examples from studies conducted in whole-language classrooms to investigate children's perspectives of their own literacy…

A study investigated how text features influence the amount of vocabulary knowledge students acquired incidentally while reading expositions. Three sets of text features were identified from studies on comprehension: (1) features associated with the macrostructure, (2) features associated with logical and temporal relations in the microstructure,…

Drawing upon data from a series of studies, this paper analyzes children's verbalizations about a wordless picture book to discover any relationships between a child's learning style and his or her comprehension of events in the book. Using the definitions of learning style established by M. Rosenberg, the paper also compares the behavior of…

Papers in this report were presented at a conference on text characteristics, convened as part of the Learning from Text Project. The foreword describes the University of California and California State University Joint Projects Steering Committee project to determine the relationship between ability to learn from text and academic achievement,…