A study was conducted to gain insight into the question answering abilities of good and poor readers by comparing how well they answered questions when their prior knowledge was at two different levels (high, low) and in four different states. These states of prior knowledge consisted of the ways in which answers to the questions were stored in…

A study was conducted to determine the stability of the effect of sex-typed reading material on the reading interests and comprehension of fifth grade boys and girls. It involved a direct replication of a 1967 study so that a comparison of data from the 312 subjects of that study could be made with the data from 374 subjects of 1979. Reading…

The increased interest in reading comprehension by researchers in fields other than reading education is noted in this paper. In addition, the concerns of the new researchers in reading are described, some of the terms they are using are explained, and the implications of their findings for reading instruction are explored. The interests of…

A study was conducted to compare five different techniques for determining the best means of assessing a reader's background knowledge and for discovering if it is possible to elicit different amounts of information from the same subject by simply varying techniques. Subjects were 32 third through sixth grade students, divided into groups of…

The preparation and use of an objective strength analysis report (OSAR) from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) are described. The OSAR was designed to answer two needs: (1) a format which allows the school to easily answer the question "which reading objectives need more emphasis and/or better materials or techniques in order to raise its…

The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction,…

A study was designed to measure the relationship between learning to read and learning to write at the elementary school level. Measures of phonics knowledge, reading vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension, and grammatical and organizational complexity of writing were administered to 256 second grade and 253 fifth grade students. The findings…

Noting that while the language experience approach to reading instruction assumes that the learner is intuitively familiar with the language and that this familiarity facilitates recognition of the language on the printed page, this paper argues that students learning to read in a second language do not have the same degree of intuitive…

The Program Analysis and Monitoring in Reading (PAM) package helps teachers and administrators anlayze, understand, and improve school reading programs by providing them with monitor reports and program reports. Both types of reports include results of student performance on tests of reading comprehension--the monitor report provides detailed…

The third in a series concerning some implications of learners' cognitive style for the development of reading competence, this paper reports on a study that was concerned with the effectiveness and efficiency with which ninth grade field dependent and field independent readers processed prose in silent reading at three difficulty levels. Results…

Sentence combining activities can be used throughout the English curriculum. The entire composing process can be developed with sentence combining activities based on student rough drafts of book reports, analysis and imitation of sentences written by professional writers, the organization of sentences in whole paragraphs or essays, and "oral…

Reflecting the interdisciplinary emphasis that reading comprehension has received during the past decade, the articles in this volume deal with both the processes involved in reading and the instructional practices used in teaching it. The six articles devoted to reading processes deal specifically with the following topics: schemata,…

As part of a research program to identify training methods which optimize skill acquisition and retention, three studies were conducted to assess the effects of type of training, amount of practice, and guided discussion in cognitive learning strategies training programs. Undergraduate students enrolled in educational psychology courses were…

This paper provides annotations of journal articles and books concerned with reading instruction for English as-a-second-language students. The annotations are arranged into five categories: (1) the need for teaching English as a second language (ESL) to non-English speaking natives with varied backgrounds and wide ranges of ability levels, (2)…

The relationship between first graders' listening comprehension and reading comprehension was examined in a study involving 64 children. Two forms of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Primary A, were administered--one orally and one silently. No significant difference was found between the mean score of the silent test and that of the oral test.…