Ways that reading evaluation programs can bring reading success to individual students are presented. Each chapter is written by an authority on one of the following topics: what evaluation is, who does it, and when it should be done; reading program goals as the basis for evaluation; informal techniques for assessing prereading behavior; use of…

Two studies used controlled exposure devices in attempts to improve braille reading. The three null hypotheses tested were that reading practice under controlled exposure does not increase reading rates, any increase will not be maintained, and no differences in comprehension occur because of practice. Subjects were selected by the Gates Basic…

The objectives of this study were to investigate the effect of four different reading programs on the decoding and comprehension skills of second and third graders. One reading program used a basal reading series which exercised little control over the grapheme-phoneme correspondences presented in the vocabulary. The second program used a basal…

This unit guide, seventh in a series of seven, is designed to provide eighth-grade social studies teachers with materials that develop the facts, attitudes, and concepts of social studies and that also present reading and study skills instruction. Information about the United States as a world leader is presented along with reading exercises in…

Understanding ideas, drawing inferences, and recognizing the author's organization and purpose are teachable comprehension skills. Prereading discussions can stimulate students to think before reading, to survey the material, and to raise questions which focus attention while reading. A study guide can develop comprehension through careful…

A view of skilled reading is suggested that emphasizes an intimate connection between coding and comprehension. It is suggested that skilled comprehension depends on a highly refined facility for generating and manipulating language codes, especially at the phonetic/articulatory level. The argument is developed that decoding expertise should be a…

Skilled reading depends upon a multiplicity of perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes; inadequate development of one or more of these processes may in turn lead to reading difficulty. This report considers some of the processes that may be especially problematic for the young reader. After an overview in which skilled reading is described…

This study discusses six specific strategies that teachers can use to improve elementary students' reading comprehension. First, teach the students to use context clues as one vital part of the decoding process, in order to improve comprehension. Second, increase students' depth of comprehension by triggering discussion of materials they have read…

Many instruments designed to assess reading comprehension reflect instructional tasks that have not clearly been shown to be a part of the process of comprehension. If the measurement instruments are to have construct validity, however, they must be created to reflect what we know about cognitive processing. Recent work in cognitive psychology has…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

The minimal comprehension principle asserts that the act of comprehension must entail an interaction between an incoming linguistic message and the reader's world knowledge. An analysis of current tests of reading comprehension indicates that test passages are likely to draw broadly from knowledge of the world, so that some of the variability in…

There are not nearly enough reading specialists to meet the needs of the large number of students with reading deficiencies. In order to determine the effectiveness of training teachers in content areas to play an active role in helping students improve their reading skills, 15 secondary level teachers representing the fields of mathematics,…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

The commonly-used instructional sequence in which children read material silently and then read it orally is simply not effective. The arguments presented by E.A. Betts in 1957 for silent before oral reading can be countered point by point. Studies that have compared various reading conditions have had serious limitations and have failed to show…