Describes three studies relating to visual functioning. Finds that reading retardation is the result of a clustering of factors, of multiple causation. Discusses the need to determine whether or not a student has the necessary lateral and other functional vision skills to maintain sufficient body energy for the demands of the reading task. (MG)

Describes an experimental investigation of how a live metaphor might help readers connect an old idea with a new concept, thereby adding new information to an existing base of knowledge. Finds that the use of metaphors may generate a meaningful learning experience for less able readers at the university level. (MG)

A Delaware middle school schedules its summer school near the end of summer, requires students and parents to attend a preliminary meeting, and features strict attendance and behavior requirements. Students' placement depends on reading ability. An evaluation showed that vocabulary, reading, writing, and math scores increased for nearly 70% of…

Using a word order correction paradigm, this study assessed syntactic awareness skills in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic…

Examines relations between morphological sensitivity and decoding ability in grades 3 through 6 to investigate the morpho-phonological nature of English orthography. Indicates that children's recognition of derivational relationships improved with grade level. Concludes that both phonological awareness and sensitivity to morphological structure…

Naturalistic observations and interviews with service workers found on-the-job reading was based on knowledge of codes and rules of practice and required problem-solving and metacognitive strategies. Workplace competencies should be considered within their social and cultural context. (SK)

Finds that: sentence reading times were facilitated during rereading to the extent that the information had been encoded from the initial reading; participants incorporated new information into their text representations; rereading improved the memory for causally important information; and the correlation between recall and importance was greater…

Compares a sample of prison inmates with the norms obtained for large samples of 12-year-old students on tests measuring word decoding skills, reading, and spelling abilities. Shows that most of the inmates performed better or at the same level as 12-year-old students on all tasks measuring reading, spelling, and word decoding skills. (SC)

Investigates differences between two types of reading probe material to monitor students' oral reading fluency over time. Reading sources were the curriculum in which the child was being instructed at school, and a set of generic (curriculum-independent) passages. Results indicated that students read significantly more words correct in the generic…

Develops structural equation models to examine the connections between reading abilities and phonological skills. Finds that skills related to reading at preschool age are similar and have the same relations in a transparent language such as Finnish as they do in English; however, differences exist, especially in the relations between phonemic…

A great deal is known about the effects of positive reinforcement on response acquisition; by contrast, much less research has been conducted on contingencies applied to errors. We examined the effects of response repetition as an error-correction procedure on the sight-word reading performance of 11 adults with developmental disabilities. Study 1…

The four strategies that can improve the ability to read informational text are discussed. The effectiveness of incorporating information text in the curriculum in the early years of school is presented.

This research examined the validity of the theoretical model of reading outlined by the Simple View of Reading when measuring reading ability with a performance-based reading test. Participants were 95 fourth-grade, students randomly sampled from four schools in an urban district. The test we studied employed a mixture of traditional…

This article details a study which predicted that across a wide range of print sizes dyslexic reading would follow the same curve shape as skilled reading, with constant reading rates across large print sizes and a sharp decline in reading rates below a critical print size. It also predicted that dyslexic readers would require larger critical…

This study had two major goals: to test the effect of administration method on the criterion validity of a commonly used working memory span test, the reading span task, and to examine the relationship between processing and storage in this task. With respect to the first goal, although experimenter- and participant-administered reading span tasks…