Eighty-eight college students were invited to cook a chocolate mousse and were allowed first to ask any question that seemed helpful to completing the task. The questions were answered immediately according to a predetermined schema: in one condition the subjects were told that the task would be rather easy, in the other condition they were told…

A New Zealand study revealed that many secondary school reading tasks are both complex and potentially confusing for pupils. Researchers joined two classes at the junior high and high school levels, and followed the students to their major content area classes--English, math, science, and social studies--for two terms. Conversations with the 60…

Research literature shows that people with access to attitude-relevant information in memory are able to draw on relevant beliefs and prior experiences when analyzing a persuasive message. This suggests that people who can retrieve little attitude-relevant information should be less able to engage in systematic processing. Two experiments were…

Confirms that able readers have a more well-rounded sense of story structure than disabled readers. Specifically, that able readers demonstrated an ability to tell more elaborate stories than disabled readers. (FL)

A study was conducted to examine the effects of prescribing the use of some specific reading strategies on comprehension. The effects of such prescription on the interactions among instructional method and a number of individual difference variables were also investigated. Subjects were 140 high school students randomly assigned to read a text…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 28 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) abled and disabled sixth grade readers' knowledge of story structure under three conditions, (2) the impact of typographical factors on the visual information…