A study was conducted to determine the effect of repeated reading of taped literature on reading achievement of culturally different remedial students in the upper elementary grades. Twenty students were selected using a matched pairs design. The experimental treatment for ten students consisted of reading while listening to the tapes and the…

Two studies were performed to investigate the effects of material and task variations in the acquisition of cognitive learning strategies. Groups of undergraduate students were taught to use mental imagery, meaningful elaboration, and grouping. The type of training task or the order of training and test materials differed for each of the…

This study has three purposes: (1) to determine whether the graphic organizer (a schematic representation of text structure using key vocabulary terms) could be used to compensate for the effects of a passage organized with a description top-level structure; (2) to explore the effectiveness of providing students differing in reading ability with…

This teacher education instructor's manual begins with some assumptions about reading and reading achievement and with recommendations for the course instructor. The major portion of the manual describes activities to help teachers match students and materials, master prereading skills to help teach reading in content areas, and understand the…

Two experiments assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. In the first experiment, the effect of differing proportions of rare-word substitutions were examined in 79 sixth grade students. It was found that a high rate of difficult vocabulary (one…

Intended as a supplement to the Reading/Literature Released Exercise Set, 1979-80 Assessment, this collection exemplifies students' written responses to thirteen open-ended exercises. Each exercise, its objectives, subobjectives, administration guidelines, and national performance levels on the exercise, are documented. Detailed, age specific…

Two studies were conducted in an effort to see if less skilled readers could be trained to pay closer attention to the hierarchically coherent aspects of text by representing text structures in nodes-relations flowcharts. The subjects were 88 students from two community colleges. A pretest-posttest design with controls was employed. The analysis…

Highlighting the significant reading gains of 9-year-old students and, to a lesser extent, 13-year-old students, this report presents the results of three assessments surveying the reading skills of American 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students during the 1970-71, 1974-75, and 1979-80 school years. The first chapter is introductory in nature,…

A top-level structure learning strategy is described in this paper. Topics covered in the paper are (1) strategic use of knowledge about top-level structure, including how the strategy works, the spontaneous use of the strategy, and the acquired use of the strategy; (2) fundamental steps in programs of instruction involving the top-level structure…

This annual report contains summaries of more than 1,200 reading research studies that appeared in print between July 1, 1979 and June 30, 1980. The summaries are arranged into six major categories. The first category lists other general bibliographies offering summaries of reading research, while the second category presents summaries of studies…

Using computer controlled text presentation that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences, a study tested two hypotheses concerning how schemata guide reading comprehension. The focusing hypothesis suggested that the schemata activated by the reader's perspective might identify relevant information to which additional…

A sample consisting of 115 college students participated in a study of the relationships between reading rate, reading comprehension, and related independent variables (attitude, motivation, and interest). A short story was used for obtaining objective rate and comprehension scores for each subject. Two questionnaires designed for the study were…

Reading times can be a valuable source of data on comprehension processes, especially in the case of recording reading times on individual sentences in a passage. To overcome the methodological problems encountered in other research efforts concerning reading times, a multiple regression method was used to compare an ordinary language processing…

Three passages of fifth-grade readability were read and recalled by 24 high- and low-ability fifth graders and college students. These passages were characterized as either narrative (high degree of temporal linkage), expository (logical linkage and abstract content), or mixed (logical linkage but with content suggestive of a narrative). The…

An investigation was conducted to ascertain the effects of the structured overview on both the short-term and long-term comprehension of average and below average readers. The subjects were 143 college students classified as average or below average readers and randomly assigned to either a structured overview (65) or a control group (78). Both…