This document summarizes a report on the implementation and impact of instructional strategies to improve students' comprehension skills at three diverse urban secondary schools. While activities and characteristics varied, educators at all three locations were implementing local variations of a school-improvement approach based on the use of the…

This report describes in depth the implementation and impact of instructional strategies to improve students' comprehension skills at three diverse urban secondary schools. While activities and characteristics varied, educators at all three locations were implementing local variations of a school-improvement approach based on the use of the…

The problems inherent in the use of norm-referenced achievement tests in evaluating reading comprehension may be alleviated through the use of a criterion-referenced, cloze type test. The Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) Test, published by the College Entrance Examination Board (1980), was designed to measure students' ability to understand English…

As a preliminary version of the rationale and content for the English-language arts portion of the "Survey of Academic Skills: Grade 12," this booklet describes elements of the new reading and editing tests to be used to complement a direct writing assessment in this part of the 1987-88 California Assessment Program (CAP). After a brief…

To analyze the validity of W. L. Taylor's cloze testing methodology, this paper first examines three areas contributing to Taylor's thinking: communications theory, the psychology of speech and communication, and the theory of dispositional mechanisms--or nonessential words--in speech. It then evaluates Taylor's research to determine how he…

Project Basic is a program developed by the Maryland State Department of Education to assure that students attain basic skills in a variety of areas. Two levels of tests are given in grade 7 to monitor progress, and in grades 9 to 12 to determine whether each student has met the state minimum competency level. Students must pass the higher level…

Summarizing more than 800 reports of reading research identified between July 1, 1987, and June 30, 1988, this book categorizes the research studies into six major areas, five of which have been further subcategorized, with the majority of studies classified into the physiology and psychology of reading area. The major areas are as follows: (1)…

PORPE, a comprehensive strategy system utilizing writing, was originally created for students who wanted to know how to study for essay examinations in their college courses. With PORPE, students are involved in (1) predicting potential essay questions to guide subsequent study; (2) organizing key ideas using their own words, structure, and…

To determine how much prior knowledge affects students' performance on a reading comprehension test, a study was undertaken to examine the prior knowledge factor in a reading competency test developed for college freshmen in New Jersey. The passages used in this test are based on common, everyday topics. Subjects were students in two sections of a…

A study examined the nature of the questions contained in two major standardized reading comprehension tests in terms of their centrality to the text. It was hypothesized that the use of a discrimination index for item selection would tend to favor relatively trivial questions. Half the reading selections from the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test…

The fill-in-test, a modified version of the cloze procedure, is relatively easy to construct, is easier to score than the cloze procedure, and yields a greater number of questions per line of text than the conventional multiple choice comprehension test. The fill-in-test is constructed by inserting blank spaces into a text and providing a number…

A review of the literature indicates that the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT) may be a viable instrument for screening students and predicting their academic success in particular circumstances. In 1981, a study was conducted at Schoolcraft College to determine the extent of the relationship between the reading abilities of entering students and…

The "Test Development Notebook" is a resource designed for the preparation of tests of literal comprehension for students in grades 1 through 12. This volume contains 120 multiple-choice cloze exercises taken from front page stories, feature stories, and editorials of newspapers; and the accompanying answer key. Each exercise carries the code…

Describes an informal test for determining a student's ability to use context clues in decoding unfamiliar words. (TO)

The Group Embedded Figures Test and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills were administered to 222 sixth grade students to explore the relationship between field-dependent/field-independent cognitive styles and reading achievement; scores from the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Tests were used to control IQ. The 60 students with the highest scores and the…