Using a text semantic framework, a two-year study examined the process by which readers construct meanings from standardized reading comprehension tests used as texts. The text analytic system described "ideal reader" interpretations of texts, allowing comparisons with real reader interpretations. Specific analyses described the ideal…

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification device that orders educational objectives in a hierarchical fashion, ranging from relatively simple skills of remembering to more complex skills of evaluating and judging. In the classroom, the taxonomy can be used as the basis of a series of questioning strategies designed to foster intellectual skills. In a…

A study examined whether (1) the performance of students on text explicit (TE), text implicit (TI), and script implicit (SI) questions inserted in a text would vary as a function of the type of question received; (2) students responding in writing to the inserted questions would perform at a higher level on a subsequent criterion test than those…

A cognitive approach to the interrelation of writing and reading assumes that production and comprehension of written text depend upon cognitive and affective schemata used in concert by a writer or reader to produce or encode, store, and retrieve text information. Both comprehending and composing are basic, complex, interactive processes with…

Theory and research in reading comprehension have confirmed the important role of text structure in learning from written materials. The previous work with story grammars provided the basis of this attempt to define frames for explanations in history that would be likely to aid learning. A suggested goal frame includes the goals, plan, action, and…

Containing data gathered in the 1979-80 assessment of reading and literature conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this report is devoted to the results of the reading comprehension and study skills portions of the assessment. A brief introduction provides information about the students surveyed and the measures used…

Suggesting that headings provide useful cues for input/output processing, this investigation examined the utility of intact (topic outline format) and embedded (appropriately positioned within text) headings as processing aids with non-narrative text material under conditions of immediate and delayed recall. Passages were selected from biology…

Noting that register and cohesion are two concepts that define a text, this paper describes register as the variety of language that is appropriate for the situation of the speech event and cohesion as the semantic relations in a text that make it coherent. The first part of the paper discusses three cross-cultural studies of comprehension…

Drawn from a symposium presented at the 1979 National Reading Conference, the four papers in this collection describe a notion of conceptual readability, an approach contrasting with traditional readability computations (number of words per sentence and degree of familiarity of individual words) and focusing on the concepts communicated by the…

This monograph was developed to assist teachers in identifying more precise ways to select materials to use in promoting basic skills development. It is meant to be used primarily by teachers of third and fifth grade pupils who must achieve the skills measured in the State Assessment Test required by Florida. Examples are provided of test…

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

This review of the literature on reading theories is built around three components: an explication of each theory, an evaluation of the theory based on an examination of its internal and external coherence and correspondence, and an application of the theory to a child's reading. The literature is organized around discussions of 12 benchmarks…

A study investigated the hypothesis that mental imagery facilitates access to prior knowledge and therefore enhances the ability to infer and make text-relevant predictions. The subjects, 29 first grade and 29 third grade students, were randomly assigned to either an experimental group where they were instructed to make pictures in their head to…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

A study was conducted to explore the reliability and validity of three prominent procedures used in informal reading inventories (IRIs): (1) choosing a 95% word recognition accuracy standard for determining student instructional level, (2) arbitrarily selecting a passage to represent the difficulty level of a basal reader, and (3) employing…