Many writers have suggested that comprehension occurs at several levels (e.g., literal, inference, and conclusion). However, many teachers spend as much as two-thirds of their time on lower-level skills such as phonics and literal-level comprehension skills. Some authors have suggested ways of assisting readers in achieving comprehension at more…

Some children lack the framework of prior experience necessary for the comprehension and enjoyment of fanciful literature. Fanciful literature, though grounded in reality, deals not only with what is, but also with what could be or might have been. Since readers actively construct meaning by relating what they read to their conceptual systems,…

Presented in two reports, this study on reading comprehension investigated whether expository passages with adjacent-to-text activities facilitate the learning of reading comprehension skills at the same time that they improve comprehension of text content, and whether written feedback increases the effectiveness of adjacent-to-text activities.…

To assess whether black children comprehend more of high- than low-interest reading material, whether the performance discrepancy between white and black children is reduced under high-interest conditions, and to determine the degree of similarity of the interests of white and black children, a study involving 33 black and 33 white fifth graders…

To determine the validity of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts in predicting reading achievement as measured by the reading scores of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the Boehm test was given to 55 kindergarten children and the Iowa test was given to 42 of the same children in second grade. The results indiciated that the Boehm test appeared to be of…

A successful content area reading program not only includes reading classes that teach specific skills, but also provides for the inservice training of teachers, offering activities that facilitate student reading comprehension in the content areas. For such a program to succeed, the financial commitment and time devoted to teacher training must…

Developed in West Virginia as part of a statewide effort to improve reading achievement through a competency based staff development program, this inservice instructional packet on comprehension is one of five designed to present classroom teachers with the essential competencies and learner outcomes involved in developmental reading. The…

Students from Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies, participated in a study to determine their overall reading ability as measured by norm- and criterion-referenced reading tests and to discover the extent to which linguistically related reading difficulties were manifested in their oral and silent reading performance. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading…

A number of issues relating to metaphor are discussed in this report. Offering an account of what makes metaphors "metaphorical" (a way of understanding what metaphors are), the report also discusses some of the psychological processes associated with the comprehension of metaphor (how the understanding of metaphors might come about).…

This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

After research between 1960 and 1977 relating to college reading program effectiveness was identified, a statistical procedure called Meta-Analysis was used to integrate findings and determine any composite benefit of instruction. Of 676 references on the initial list, 66 studies were identified as having quantifiable data within the limits of the…

Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…

A study was carried out to discover if readers responded affectively to the connotative meanings of certain words and if better readers were more or less responsive to these connotations than were average or poor readers. A total of 120 students in five intact eleventh grade classes completed semantic differential scales to measure both individual…

This report was prepared to assist the United States Army in evaluating the usefulness of readability formulas in identifying material that will be comprehended by readers at a given reading skill level. Existing readability methods and research findings were reviewed against three major criterion questions and the findings are discussed. The…

A college survival skills course, designed to help college-bound high school seniors develop an efficient, organized approach to college reading and study skills, is described in this paper. After outlining the steps taken in developing and promoting the course, the paper notes favorable reactions to it, lists the course textbooks, and describes…