This paper connects recent research with common student problems in writing research papers and offers an analysis of the range of synthesis tasks and some reasons why students have difficulty with the demands of these tasks. The paper focuses on the student's problem of not knowing how to think about material in ways that allow him or her to say…

A study explored how writers with extensive experience and learning in an academic discipline used both topical and rhetorical knowledge to construct synthesis essays. Subjects, 20 psychology graduate students and 20 business graduate students, wrote synthesis essays on either the topics of "supply-side economics" or "rehearsal in…

Teacher educators need to take the responsibility for providing future teachers with long-term evaluative skills necessary to select good literature. Educators must also take responsibility for modeling the powerful notion that books or literature aid in everyone's personal search for meaning. The process of analyzing literature is helpful in…

A study explored whether the use of a study guide would improve students' comprehension of content area material. Two groups of students in an eighth grade social studies class were involved: students in the control group received the usual instruction--the chapter was read orally and discussed in class--while students in the experimental sample…

A text is the locus of many intersecting processes, the origins, character, and operative principles of which should be the main focus of its discussion in a writing class. These processes can be classified into the four major components of the communicative act: the writer, the reader, the social conditions of communication, and the historical…

Reading comprehension can be more effectively taught using new instructional frameworks--such as explicit comprehension instruction--rather than the basal reading model. Traditionally, comprehension has been taught through a process of mentioning the skill that students should apply, practicing the skill in workbooks, and assessing student…

This study is the third in a series of reports of the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This part of the study examines the problem that teachers have in judging whether textual signals that students use to indicate a persuasive analysis of…

This study is the 11th and last report from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. The report consists of an Introduction and seven essays, each of which discusses ways to teach a variety of aspects of reading and writing which have been tried…

Because of its wide range of justifiable interpretations, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is an appropriate novel to use to help students become better critical readers. Scholarly criticism continues to debate the topic of Tess's character, yet recent feminist and deconstructionist approaches, as well as recently published…

Intended to facilitate a broader emphasis on creative writing in American high school English classes, this manual offers a number of writing laboratory exercises. The exercises are divided into five categories: (1) library skills, including reference book know how, and using the parts of books; (2) critical reading skills, including…

In developing critical reading, humor may contribute to three broad categories of skills: discerning the author's purpose, inferencing, and evaluating content. Passages from children's books such as "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" or "The Great Brain" can help to illustrate the need for teachers and students to thoughtfully…

This study compares the critical-reading strategies of 83 good and 72 poor sixth-grade readers and 96 good and 67 poor eighth-grade readers. After reading seven brief passages on social studies and science topics, the students responded to 42 statements that required either the ability to pull facts together and make conclusions based on unstated…

This monograph is one in a series of semiannual reports that focus on research related to reading in secondary schools. The four reports collected in this monograph examine the following topics: (1) attitudes of preservice secondary school teachers toward reading in the content areas; (2) the effects of a content area reading institute upon…

A year-long interdisciplinary project sought to develop professors' available repertoire of strategies for guiding students' independent learning from texts and developing students' ability to learn from texts with adjunct guide materials in a minicourse setting. Adjunct materials included such instructor devised aids as study questions, graphic…

The papers presented in this annual reading conference report focus on various aspects of the topic, "The Reading Environment." The opening address advocates establishing reading programs that correspond to the developmental stages of individual children--programs that consider the needs of the whole child. The other papers delivered at the…