A description is provided of 12 reading skills strategies that were developed as part of a Reading across the Curriculum project to help students bridge the gap between their reading levels and the reading level of their textbooks. Following introductory information on the Reading across the Curriculum project, the 12 strategies are explained and…

Horizontal instruction techniques used to improve reading skills were tested with 63 limited-English-speaking, Spanish-dominant high school students. The students were divided into four groups. Two experimental groups received instruction in how to infer the main idea of a paragraph through sequential lessons in classification skills. Two control…

In a study examining the effectiveness of story-impressions (a previewing strategy) on story comprehension, remedial eighth grade students were asked to write predictions or "story-guesses" based on a series of one-word clues (story-impressions) that had been extracted from the material to be read. Having written a logical…

A study explored whether the use of a study guide would improve students' comprehension of content area material. Two groups of students in an eighth grade social studies class were involved: students in the control group received the usual instruction--the chapter was read orally and discussed in class--while students in the experimental sample…

A study explored whether teaching the comprehension skills of inference, drawing conclusions, sequencing, and cause and effect would increase student achievement in reading and language while at the same time imparting social science content. Subjects, 197 eighth grade students in the experimental group and 192 eighth grade students in the control…

Since the precise nature of the effects of notetaking encoding has not been clearly specified, a study involving 111 suburban seventh graders (southeastern Idaho) explored the differential effects of traditional notetaking and of episodic organizers (a type of semantic web or map) on the encoding of complex narrative passages. Subjects were…

A study examined the impact of instruction on the metacognitive strategies of five fifth-grade students whose vocabulary knowledge test scores were two or more stanines higher than their comprehension test scores. The students were administered "The Informal Reading Inventory" to determine their appropriate functional levels and the…

Intended for secondary school content area teachers, this book provides a sequence of steps through which classroom content area reading programs can be developed. The chapters discuss the following: (l) four methods of diagnosis for content area reading; (2) a procedure for assessing the richness of retellings; (3) approaches to content area…

This collection of competency statements deals with the reading, writing, and mathematics skills that youth participating in Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) programs should develop. Addressed in the individual sections of the volume are the following basic skill areas: gaining proficiency in elementary reading, developing the ability to read…

The skills and concepts described in this kindergarten through grade eight reading program guide emphasize the following: (1) teachers' expectations for and attitudes toward students affect student performance, (2) students' self-concepts and expectations are related to their achievement, (3) children learn in different ways and at different…

This study investigated the development of students' abilities to integrate information in stories as an aspect of reading comprehension. Students aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 judged the importance of key statements, which varied in their causal relations within an episode, between episodes, and in a higher-order structure, yielding three levels of…

Two studies of integrated language instruction for students of English as a second language (ESL) are reported. The first had two objectives: to (1) investigate the effects of writing activities on the comprehension and retention of content area reading and (2) examine the relationship between the students' ability to select the main idea and…

Reading comprehension can be more effectively taught using new instructional frameworks--such as explicit comprehension instruction--rather than the basal reading model. Traditionally, comprehension has been taught through a process of mentioning the skill that students should apply, practicing the skill in workbooks, and assessing student…

One of a series of Parallel Alternative Strategies for Students (PASS) packages developed to provide Florida teachers with modified approaches for presenting content courses to mainstreamed exceptional students, this guide was designed as a supplementary text and workbook for a high school English course. The guide is divided into seven units of…

In spring 1988, a study was conducted at Cuyahoga Community College's Western Campus (Ohio) to measure the reading comprehension level of a sample of 1988 students and to compare their reading test scores with the scores of students who had taken the same test in 1979 and 1980; to determine if there were a correlation between the number of items a…