Explains the details of a method of teaching text structure that proved successful in improving both reading comprehension and summary writing of fifth graders. Reports that students quickly learned how to attend to and remember main ideas from problem-solution passages in their textbooks and how to write summaries. (MG)

Suggests educators may need to modify printed communication to accommodate the reading levels of hearing impaired learners. An investigation found that elementary education majors with limited experience with deaf individuals did not modify their written communication. (CB) (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on Literacy Education)

Education lags behind other scientific disciplines in its effective use of data displays. An example is provided in which the reorganization of data from two bar graphs into one table highlights the obvious and subtle results. To address the need for effective data display, the companion article, "Understanding Graphs and Tables," was…

Reports on a study of "considerateness" of five fifth-grade social studies textbooks. Identifies four elements of considerateness: (1) readability level; (2) placement of relevant pictures or illustrations; (3) use of subtitles; and (4) use of words and phrases to connect ideas within and between sentences. (CFR)

Eighty college students read textbook passages that either included marginal inserts to signal key concepts or did not include these inserts. Signaling key concepts enhanced performance on content quizzes overall and on subsets of items assessing signaled material. Performance was not affected on subsets of items for nonsignaled content. Students…

One of the most important, and most studied, aspects of human perception is the act of reading. Reading has received much attention from researchers, both from a human information processing (HIP) approach and as a common, practical act that needs to be optimized, especially in the realm of human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the text …

Many public libraries in the United States have undertaken the planning process suggested by the Public Library Association. They have incorporated into their mission statements some of the Association's eight basic library service roles as local priorities. This study explored the relationship between the chosen service role of 12 public library…

A study examined the effects of controlled language ("primerese") on children's reading. Four primerese stories from basal readers were rewritten to make the language less controlled and more natural, and the effects of these changes on several aspects of oral reading and comprehension were examined. Sixty first graders were divided into…

Studies suggesting appropriate literature for children at various stages of social and intellectual development can offer only a general picture of children's changing response to literature. While smaller children appear to prefer shorter stories in simple language, for example, they readily accept the unfamiliar place names or nonsense words of…

Recent studies refuting the effectiveness of advance organizers in preparing students to comprehend text material have not met the conditions necessary for advance organizers to succeed. According to the assimilation theory, which holds that people learn by chaining what is known to what is to be learned, the following conditions must be met for…

Five fifth grade and five sixth grade textbooks commonly used in Michigan public schools were examined to determine the extent to which they (1) reflected the pluralistic nature of the U.S. society and also (2) showed scholarship, educational soundness, and appropriate readability. Six of eight independent and qualified educators reviewed and…

These instructor's materials consist of a handbook directed to the teacher and 33 worksheets teachers can use with adult students in order to use the cloze procedure to assess how readily they can read materials of differing complexity. The handbook introduces the materials by considering such questions as What is meant by reading?, How could…

Both sentence length and sentence complexity of various kinds of newspaper prose were examined in a study to determine (1) ways newspaper prose differs from the prose of books native English speaking students chose to read and enjoy reading and (2) whether there are features of newspaper prose other than vocabulary and a lack of international news…

A study examined the readability of vocational horticulture instructional materials used by 40 schools participating in the 1981 Ohio Horticulture Achievement Testing Program. During the first part of the study, researchers administered a mail questionnaire to 31 teachers to identify the materials that were used most frequently, to obtain…

Noting that traditional measures of textbook difficulty and traditional measures of student reading ability suffer from a lack of correspondence, this booklet deals with the problems of (1) identifying the levels of conceptual difficulty of text materials, (2) identifying students' abilities to understand text materials, (3) matching the…