The hypothesized relationship between an individual's age, educational background, and ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity was investigated in this study. The 90 subjects included ten students in each of grades two, four, six, eight, and ten, as well as ten college undergraduates, ten graduate students, ten high school graduates,…

This report summarizes the development and validation of a test of literal comprehension based on a modified cloze technique. This modification of the cloze offers an objective and partially computerized procedure for constructing items in the multiple-choice format. A field test of the multiple-choice cloze (MCC) involved the administration of 36…

Previous research used a picture-word interference task to show that skilled and less skilled comprehenders in the third and fifth grades could retrieve the meaning of primer-level words equally well. With a similar task and comparable groups of children this study assessed the relationship between word difficulty and semantic access by using both…

The lack of reading instruction for seventh and eighth graders is detrimental to their academic development at a most crucial educational period. This study presents both theory and data which substantiate the need for including reading as a specific curriculum element in the middle school. Middle school organizational plans are outlined and…

In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…

From a total enrollment of 440 students in business communication classes, 270 voluntarily participated in a study of the relationship between the placement of performance objectives and reading comprehension. Students were tested for reading comprehension and were randomly assigned to one of two experiments and to pre-, post-, or no-objective…

This study investigated the possibility of training or improving intrasentence organizational skills (i.e., those that enable the reader to encode and process verbal information in higher-order units) and explored the effects that training had on reading comprehension. The subjects were 31 third graders, 16 experimental students and 15 control…

This study attempted to discover the relative contribution to spelling achievement (the dependent variable) of each of the following independent variables: intelligence, visual memory, auditory memory, structural analysis, phonetic analysis, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Participating in the study were 190 students from six seventh-grade…

This study examines gains in comprehension and vocabulary as measured by the "Gates MacGinitie Reading Tests" among students in grades two, four, and six, placed for reading instruction according to three systematic determinations of measured instructional level and students not placed other than by teacher judgment. No significant differences…

Stella Center's belief in the basic importance of grammatical structure as a factor in reading comprehension substantiated the author's theory that the ability to comprehend syntactic structure is positively correlated with the ability to comprehend meaning. Original instruments devised to test this hypothesis included a test which utilized…

This study examined the effects of three reading programs on the reading comprehension and vocabulary of 895 fifth graders and sixth graders. One program used a conventional basal reader; the second used the supplementary, behaviorally referenced Brentwood Educational System for Testing (BEST) and conventional basal reading materials; the third…

Word-deletion items to be used as measures of comprehension were constructed by deleting a content word from an ambiguous target sentence constrained by an accompanying context sentence. One hundred twenty, third-grade students and 120 sixth-grade students each completed all of the items as one of three degrees of contextual constraint. Analysis…

This study attempted to answer the following questions: Are all the concepts that reading tests are attempting to measure being taught in school? What are the characteristics of effective reading programs in school (e.g., amount of time, methods, materials, assistance, and support)? and What community-based variables are related to reading…

Test management systems are suggested for individualizing the teaching of reading in the elementary classroom. Test management systems start with a list of objectives or specific goals which cover all or some major areas of the learning to read process. They then develop a large number of criterion referenced tests which match the skill areas at…

Data from four of the Cooperative First Grade Studies (1964-1965) were reanalyzed for four first grade projects, (Fry, Hayes, Mazurkiewicz, and Tanyzer). These projects were selected because they compared the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach with traditional orthography-basal reader approaches. The focal point of this reanalysis was to study the…