Although literacy achievement has improved in Chile, adolescents' underperformance in reading comprehension is still a serious concern. In English, core academic-language skills (CALS) have been found to significantly predict reading comprehension, even controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge. CALS are high-utility language skills that…

Critically reviews an earlier published study that assessed the sensitivity of the cloze procedure to intersentential integration. (AEA)

Describes a study designed to determine whether one-minute or two-minute tests of reading rates are more reliable and whether warm-up exercises improve the accuracy of rate measures. Indicates that results were inconsistent with theoretical expectations and past research and suggests that no changes in standardized testing practices are currently…

An overall look is taken at the cloze research method as a new tool for measuring readability. The construction of a cloze readability test is described as well as several studies made on the reliability and validity of such tests. Included also are some methodological considerations to be kept in mind when constructing a cloze test. Data is…

Based on the premise that composition skills and their evaluation are crucial to the educational process, this paper presents a tentative research program for conducting future English as a second language (ESL) composition evaluation studies. The program developed in the paper covers the following topics as areas which merit further rigorous…

Questions the results of an earlier study that found that accommodating instructional style to disadvantaged students' interaction patterns increases the students' achievement-related behavior. (AEA)

Informal Reading Inventories (IRI) are often recommended as instructionally relevant measures of reading. However, they have also been criticized for inattention to technical quality. Examination of reliability evidence in nine recently revised IRIs revealed that fewer than half report reliability. Several appear to have sufficient reliability for…

Finds considerable instability across two administrations of Carbo's Reading Styles Inventory (RSI), for both the reading methods and the recommended adjustments for implementing the methods. Finds it unlikely that reported benefits from adjusting instruction based on the RSI derive from matching a method to assessed style. (SR)

LANGUAGE ENCODING AND DECODING PROCESSES WERE EXAMINED BY DETERMINING THE ABILITY OF SUBJECTS TO PREDICT OMISSIONS FROM A NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXT WHICH THEY HAD PREVIOUSLY PRODUCED THEMSELVES, AND BY COMPARING THIS PERFORMANCE WITH THAT OF OTHER SUBJECTS TO PREDICT OMISSIONS FROM THESE SAME TEXTS WHICH THE SECOND GROUP READ AT THE TIME OF…

Describes the construction of a nonreading instrument (Preschool Reading Attitudes Scale) designed to assess attitudes toward reading in young children, aged three through five years. Demonstrates the scale to be valid and reliable with these age groups. (HOD)

The minimal comprehension principle asserts that the act of comprehension must entail an interaction between an incoming linguistic message and the reader's world knowledge. An analysis of current tests of reading comprehension indicates that test passages are likely to draw broadly from knowledge of the world, so that some of the variability in…

Investigates a reversed cloze procedure in which high information words are deleted from a passage. Concludes that this procedure is both reliable and unique. (VJ)

Focusing on the problems of validity and representativeness of samples, a study examined the history of literacy in the United States since 1880 in order to set the contemporary debate on test scores, literacy and reading performance in the longer-range perspective of the last 100 years. The quality of the data and the arguments of literacy…

A study was conducted to provide a replication of the gaze duration algorithm proposed by M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter using a different kind of passage, to compare the three gaze duration algorithms that have been proposed by other researchers, and to measure processing time in reading. Fifty-one college students read a passage while their eye…

Discusses the progress in accurate measurement of reading, the major challenges for reading researchers in developing better measures in reading, and significant developments in the near future. (RS)