Investigation of the effect of establishing purposes for reading upon reading comprehension showed that neither specific nor general reading directions appeared to affect performance and that purpose-setting directions served to discriminate between intentional and incidental information only for above-grade-level readers.

Reading is comprehension, it is a complex network of interrelated skills, and it involves several levels of thinking, but in a holistic rather than in a molecular response to the text. The practice of reading based on this theoretical understanding involves identifying levels of comprehension; noting that levels of comprehending are not strictly…

Sixty-six grade six students were subjects in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching children the reading comprehension skill of main idea identification. Both experimental groups (strategy and basal) and the control group received eight lessons of 30 minutes each. All instruction occurred over a…

Success in the study of literature depends on the student's ability to establish connections between word and object, between words and phrases, and between memorable experiences in all fields of learning and the reading of literature, which is interdisciplinary by nature. In understanding a literary work, a reader must make affective memory…

Although critics persist in attacks on the teaching profession in general and the teaching of reading in particular, both elementary and secondary school reading scores have increased steadily over the past three decades. Even Black and Hispanic students (who still score below the averages for White students tested) have made sizeable gains in…

A study investigated the effect of instruction about conventional expository text structure on fifth-graders' ability to learn from similarly structured social studies material. Subjects, 82 fifth graders from four heterogeneous classrooms in two schools in a small midwestern city, were assigned to either a structure training group which received…