Test items designed to measure the four language skills and their combinations are presented; various presentations of item types (question, statement, sentence completion, etc.) are illustrated; and the best possible uses are given for each of the different types. The author is Chief of the Measurement Branch, Defense Language Institute, English…

Outlines the remedial program at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is designed to reduce the high dropout rate in junior colleges. Bibliography. (RW)

A Monte Carlo design examined how the effects of guessing and item dependence influence test characteristics and student scores. Although validity for cloze variants was high, multiple-choice cloze had significantly lower reliabilities than did true score equivalents. (Author/PN)

The quantity of education in vocabulary, reading comprehension, mathematics, science, social studies, and English has a positive effect on academic achievement for high school students with similar background characteristics (ability, sex, race, and social class). The greatest correlation was found in mathematics, the least in vocabulary and…

Indicates that students were much more likely to comprehend text when they had a culturally appropriate schema into which to incorporate new information. (AEA)

A reanalysis of data from a 1980 Miami University study on sentence-combining in freshman writing courses investigated the role of reading comprehension (measured by the Sequential Test of Educational Progress) as a predictor of growth in writing skills (measured by syntactic and qualitative criteria). (Author/PN)

Training to self-monitor reading comprehension was undertaken with 120 learning disabled eighth and ninth graders and normally achieving sixth graders. It was hypothesized that insufficient metacomprehension is one possible cause underlying learning disabled adolescents' comprehension problems. (Author/SEW)

Investigated two methods of segmenting text based upon phrase boundaries in an attempt to make social studies textbooks more readable for elementary school students. Concludes that phrasing the passages for students improved their reading comprehension by approximately one grade level. (FL)

Describes an instructional procedure based on the findings of schema research and illustrating the truth that the more students know about a subject, the better they can comprehend what they read about that subject. (FL)

Finds evidence that the reading of content area materials is done less effectively than is the reading of basal readers or trade books, particularly at the lower grade levels. (FL)