Many students have difficulty in science because they are passive readers, readers who receive information without understanding. Passive readers begin reading assignments without thinking about the subject. Their counterparts, known as active readers, interact with text to construct meaning. They make predictions, ask questions, generate…

Psychological research has identified a number of cognitive processes and language abilities that are involved in the development of reading skills. This paper examines the ways in which research findings relate to current curriculum practices in such areas as learning letters and sounds; developing auditory perception skills; word recognition;…

A 2 x 3 factorial design was employed to assess the efficacy of peer teaching and token reward contingencies (contingent tokens, noncontingent "yoked" tokens, and no tokens) in a remedial reading program. The relationship between on-task performance and reading improvement was also assessed. Forty-two fourth grade to sixth grade rural Appalachian…

Government survey results reveal that large numbers of adults in the United States do not possess the minimal survival and life-coping skills necessary to function successfully in daily living. Since reading is the most basic of all life survival skills, a thematic reading that emphasized consumer survival was developed in the fall of 1977 at…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

Two studies were undertaken to investigate the effect of a tutoring practicum module. This module was designed to improve the performance of education undergraduates using the informal inventory (IRI) in making auditory discriminations during oral reading between departures from text that either could or could not be explained as phonological…

In a study of the way adult basic education (ABE) students answer different kinds of questions about what they read, 221 students were asked to read ten passages during a ten-week period and to answer ten questions about each passage immediately after reading it. Each set of questions included three dealing with facts, three dealing with word…

Two hundred Honolulu-area students from the fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth grades participated in a study that examined the variables effects of five selected factors (developmental level, sex, reading ability, adult intervention, and variation in film content/form) on the ability of two age groups (nine and ten year old children and thirteen…

The six authors of this monograph draw from their experience in elementary education in proposing practical techniques for using literature to teach a variety of literacy skills to children. The following topics are developed individually: reading for learning about the nature of language, picture books for reading vocabulary, the trade book as an…

The effect of ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching techniques on student learning was investigated. A group of 18 ESL teachers and their classes were observed across four lessons having a similar content. Students were pre- and post-tested over a six-month period in two measures of language performance: oral comprehension and production.…

Systematic classroom observation instruments were used to study the relationship between student coping style and student growth in reading. Classrom behaviors were recorded in the fall and the following spring with the Coping Analysis Schedule for Educational Settings (CASES). Data were analyzed separately for two types of classroom setings:…

Two types of problems are found in the reading performance of children with poor work habits: a child may have mastered skills but performs inadequately in tasks due to poor work habits, and a child may never have mastered skills because of such habits. Work habit behavior is the student's tendency to apply himself or herself to learning tasks by…

The main purpose of this study was to determine and describe the effects of the comprehension component of the criterion-referenced reading program, Wisconsin Design for Reading Skills Development (WDRSD), on reading achievement and self-concept of sixth-grade students. Parametric techniques were employed in a quasi-experimental study involving 44…

This document describes a course in the teaching of reading for content-area teachers, which has been offered at Temple University since 1970. It was designed to help English, science, and social studies teachers meet state certification requirements in reading. The theoretical base of the course is psycholinguistic, with a major emphasis upon…

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…