A study investigated whether students instructed in the use of dialogue journals in reading classes would show a significant increase in reading comprehension as compared to students who did not use dialogue journals in reading class. Subjects, 77 seventh- and eighth-graders in an Iowa School, were assigned to either experimental or control…

A practicum addressed the high percentage of students who were experiencing difficulty with reading comprehension and vocabulary retention in a fifth-grade Drop Out Prevention class by implementing a supplemental whole-language program. Subjects were 19 fifth-grade students. An informal reading inventory, an attitude survey, and academic grades…

This book addresses a wide range of reading needs by providing exercises that focus on comprehension and word strategies. It also provides an instructional process for meeting those needs. The instructional process is individualized, and is designed to: (1) assess initial reading competence; (2) direct learners to the chapters specifically related…

A study determined the effect of outlining and networking on college students' comprehension and retention of expository text, and examined the individual difference of preferred dominant hemispheric mode for its effect and interaction with the notetaking strategy. Subjects, 98 students enrolled in a required study skills course at Delaware State…

Designed to provide specific instructional suggestions for integrating basic reading and writing instruction in the elementary school, the lesson ideas presented in this booklet are applicable across grade levels and can be used with any basic reading and language arts textbook series. The 30 ideas cover a variety of areas, including the…

To determine the influence of the health care provider's gender and profession on readers' memory for health information, 48 university students were asked to read a three page article on heart attacks that was attributed to either (1) a female nurse, (2) a male nurse, (3) a female physician, or (4) a male physician. After reading the article, the…

Recommendations for improving communications skills are offered. It is stated that the process of communicating involves passing information and understanding from one person to another; a one-way process of sending out information is not good enough. To help principals communicate more effectively with their staff, recommendations are offered on…

The Berkeley Reading Tests Project has selected as its principal object of study standardized tests of reading comprehension. The interest is in the assessment of such tests, with respect to their performance as measures of the reading comprehension abilities of school children. A serious study of the assessment of reading comprehension requires…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses that the ability to draw inferences from a text about an unstated agent is based on the quality of information available to the reader, and that the quality of the information is itself based on the unique nature of cues embedded in the text and on the relevance of prior knowledge held by the…

A study was conducted to determine the validity of the Op-In procedure in measuring global comprehension and to identify patterns of integrative thinking similar to those of pilot study subjects. The Op-In procedure is a type of cloze procedure that deletes every other sentence ending from a passage. Three sixth grade level scientific passages…

A total of 172 students in 4th, 7th, and 11th grades read 4 stories excerpted from reading and social studies materials featuring main characters as either traditional or nontraditional females, or traditional or nontraditional males. The study sought to determine (1) the impact of male main characters in nontraditional roles on student's sex-role…

Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

Activities in this elementary unit focus on developing students' locational skills while strengthening their ability to read and follow instructions. Seven maps of varying complexity are accompanied by worksheets containing 8 to 13 direction exercises. Students are instructed to place buildings, landmarks, and labels in accurate locations on each…

To determine the effects of race and dialect in communication effectiveness, a study integrated research in referential communication with work on standard and black English, creating three hypotheses: that decoding within-race or within-dialect would be more effective than decoding across race or dialect, that decoding within any dialect would be…

Teacher logs for 600 reading group sessions from grades 1, 3, and 5 were analyzed to identify whether the amount and mode of assigned contextual reading differed systematically between "good" and "poor" reading groups. Analyses indicated that groups comprised of good readers read more total words and more words silently than…