Recognizing that children's spontaneous use of text structure facilitates their comprehension of expository prose, a study examined the transfer effects of graphic organizer instruction on 24 fourth grade students' ability to use top-level structure in the comprehension and recall of new content area material. Subjects were randomly assigned to…

Intended as a resource to help mathematics teachers better understand how reading difficulties can affect student math performance, this annotated bibliography contains approximately 75 entries. The entries are arranged into the following categories: (1) reading skills needed in mathematics, (2) mathematical vocabulary and symbols, (3)…

Three suggestions are offered to the teacher of reading: permit the students to read, encourage students to guess or predict, and focus the students' attention on meaning. (JH)

A study examined good and poor readers' inferencing strategies as they read unambiguous texts. Subjects, 42 fifth-grade students from 11 classrooms in a Boston metropolitan area urban school district, read 2 well-constructed mystery stories divided into 6 episodes--each episode ended with the introduction of a new clue related to solving the case.…

The definitions of and literature on test speededness are reviewed, and factors and areas in which the tests reveal their strengths and limitations are discussed. The focus of this article is on speeded reading comprehension tests used for entry or re-entry placement in postsecondary institutions. Speeded tests were prompted by the accelerating…

The 1987-88 Compensatory Language Experiences and Reading-Recovery (CLEAR-RR) Program of the Columbus, Ohio Public Schools was implemented to provide early intervention to 393 underachieving first-grade pupils in Columbus, Ohio schools who appeared unlikely to learn to read successfully without intensive instruction. The program's two major goals…

Intended to help teachers, researchers, curriculum developers, and administrators develop improved policy in reading instruction and research, this book challenges several widespread assumptions about effective reading instruction and concludes with 20 policy guidelines which can be used to evaluate existing reading programs and redesign them to…

To assess the reading achievement of American school children, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) surveyed nationally representative samples of approximately 13,000 students at grades 4, 8, and 12 attending public and private schools across the nation. Students read a variety of literary and informative passages and then…

Four commercial test preparation programs were evaluated for their effectiveness in increasing scores of elementary school student on standardized multiple-choice tests. Focus was on determining whether: formal training increases students' test-taking skills, students can generalize the test wiseness strategies to improve their scores on…

This study examined deaf children's reading comprehension in relation to the linguistic structures of their sign languages of fluency and the amount of sign language input they had received. Children (n=47) born severely or profoundly deaf, in age groups from 7 to 15 years and all attending day classes in which the English-structured Manually…

This literature review examines use of the cloze procedure for assessing reading and language competence and for planning individualized reading curricula. The first half of the paper describes studies performed with non-hearing-impaired students, discussing validation of the cloze procedure, establishment of criterion test scores, and the…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) measures the English language proficiency of foreign students who apply for higher education in the United States. It is administered according to a strict schedule through the International and Special Center (I&SC) testing program or at ad hoc intervals by institutional users as part of the…

A pilot study assessed the effects of training in self-awareness and self-regulation on the reading comprehension of students in a postsecondary occupational training program. Subjects, 11 students enrolled in a community college technical training program in welding, were given training sessions that provided practice in metacognitive methods…

A series of three studies examined the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' main idea construction processes. Eight expert readers read texts from familiar and unfamiliar content domains, and gave verbal reports of the processes they used for constructing main ideas. Five distinct main idea construction processes were reported: (1)…