A study examined the effect of the prereading activity called story impressions on reading comprehension and oral reading miscues of students. Story impressions give clues concerning characters and events in an as yet unread story and ask the students to write a story to make the story fragment comprehensible. Subjects, 60 second grade students…

A study examined the relative merits of characteristics of general modeling when applied to cognitive modeling of reading comprehension processes and whether the characteristics of modeling, when applied to cognitive modeling of reading processes, influence comprehension and comprehension monitoring. Subjects, 100 eighth grade students who could…

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…

To determine how frequently various forms of anaphora appear in materials written for children, 1,000-word excerpts were analyzed from the second, fourth, and sixth grade texts of four basal reader series. The basal programs consisted of the "Ginn Reading Program," the "Houghton Mifflin Reading Program,""Scott, Foresman…

The focus of this paper is on some of the difficulties students experience in learning from texts and in solving other types of academic problems, because of their failure to distinguish between skills needed for everyday thinking and those needed for academic thinking. The paper discusses the types of processing problems children experience when…

This manual describes the model--specifically the observation procedures and coding systems--used in a longitudinal study of how children learn to comprehend what they read, with particular emphasis on science texts. Included are procedures for the following: identifying students; observing--recording observations and diagraming the room; writing…

A detailed teaching model designed to develop effective reading skills in content areas (ERICA) is presented in this document. The paper begins with a discussion of the four stages of the ERICA model: (1) preparing for reading, (2) thinking through information, (3) extracting and organizing information, and (4) translating information. The paper…

Citing studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and by Dolores Durkin, this paper argues that students are not being taught higher level comprehension skills, such as inference, and presents hypotheses explaining this failure. The paper suggests that emphasis on skills and drills and the typical programed format advanced by…

The advantages of using authentic cultural materials in teaching second languages and the development of productive activities to accompany these materials are described. Based on the notion that comprehension precedes production, authentic texts provide the second language learner with a foundation of concepts and vocabulary from which…

Two instructional strategies stress effective reading during science instruction at the middle grade level. One uses print material for enrichment, while the second uses print as the primary instructional medium. Teachers can help students get ready to read in content areas by stimulating their interest in a variety of ways: capitalizing on chance…

Networking or mapping strategies can be used to help secondary school students in remedial reading programs identify and understand ideas and relationships among ideas encountered in their content area textbooks. Essentially, networking and mapping are note taking procedures that require students to represent ideas from texts in some sort of…

This report describes the development and norming of parallel forms of the Air Force Reading Abilities Test (AFRAT) which have been designed for Air Force use as replacements for commercial reading tests. A previous study on service applicants found considerably divergent reading grade levels (RGL's) from different commercial tests for subjects of…

Students must develop self-monitoring abilities if they are to successfully transfer knowledge and strategies they are taught to their own reading. But first, teachers must know just what this knowledge and these strategies are and how they can be presented to students. Akin to model building, reading comprehension involves a variety of behaviors…

Prediction of academic success in introductory psychology courses is useful for both students and teachers. Although scores on the major intellectually oriented standardized aptitude tests are often useful predictors of introductory psychology grades, these scores are frequently unavailable. When major standardized measures of general intellectual…

The two terms reading problems and learning disabilities are not synonymous. Nevertheless, an increasing number of children who have reading problems are being labeled as learning disabled. Given the growing numbers of children failing to become competent readers, the fact that more and more of these children are being identified and treated as…