The Canadian Institute for Research in Behavioral and Social Sciences of Calgary was awarded a contract by the Provincial Government of Alberta to assess student skills and knowledge in reading and written composition. Here evaluation is defined and the use of standardized and criterion referenced tests for evaluating reading performance are…

Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

This study reports the results of a program focused on the amelioration of reading comprehension deficits in a sample of rural children. The results suggest that spatial skills operate causally on subsequent verbal acquisitions, and may be central to remediation of reading difficulties in children of low socioeconomic status. (Author/KC)

Measures of abstract reasoning ability, degree of bidialectism, and reading performance were administered to Black, inner-city third and fifth graders. Abstract reasoning ability significantly affected reading performance while expressive proficiency in Standard English and Black English did not significantly affect scores. The importance of…

Children read sets of words under three conditions: with no pictures, with related pictures, and with unrelated pictures. Results indicated that words were read more slowly whenever pictures were present; that unrelated pictures produced more interference than related pictures; and that both effects were inversely related to reading ability.…

Investigates the validity of the assumption that prerequisite skills to reading competence have been identified; presents a study based on student test scores and a survey of teachers' evaluations of these students. (Survey responses are appended.) (MAI)

Describes procedures for constructing and administering informal reading measures on the secondary level and discusses the proper analysis of the test results. (MAI)

Six years ago the late Commissioner of Education, James Allen, proclaimed the "Right-to-Read" as the educational target of the current decade. The object of this program was to develop reading skills among Americans lacking such skills. An evaluation of that program was presented. (Author/RK)

Although word recognition tests continue to be widely employed by teachers, the application of out-of-date norms and varying methods of administration and scoring seriously reduce the usefulness of these tests. As a result, a restandardization of the Burt-Vernon and Schonell tests was undertaken to produce reliable norms and to standardize…

Concludes that spelling-trained kindergarten children learned to read a set of words more effectively than controls. Argues that their greater success was not because they had learned to sound out and blend words, but rather because they had become better at phonetic cue reading. (FL)

The differences between good and poor readers using story schema in recall and reconstruction tasks was examined. Results showed that good and poor readers could use a story schema when the story followed canonical format. Conclusions supported the view that poor readers perform quite differently from younger normal children. (Author/JAZ)

Analysis of deaf college students' (N=100) performance on the Degrees of Reading Power test (which assesses reading comprehension with use of a modified cloze procedure) revealed that postlingually deaf students scored higher than prelingually deaf students. Scores correlated with degree of hearing loss for prelingually deaf students and…

The effects of examples used with application adjunct questions on concept learning were evaluated. Results indicated that application adjunct questions did not produce significantly higher performance on criterion questions than no-question treatments. Matched adjunct questions produced higher levels of performance on criterion than unmatched…

This study assessed the influence of reading ability and difficulty of material on types of oral reading errors made by 42 second-grade children. Overall, types of errors changed as the material became more difficult. The interactions between reading ability and difficulty level were also significant. (Author/BS)

Argues that the Degrees of Reading Power test is not a valid tool for its main purpose, matching students to appropriate texts, because the test's units of text difficulty are not uniformly comparable to the test's units used to reflect a reader's ability. (HOD)