A study was conducted to determine whether vocabulary instruction in the "little" words would enhance children's performance on mathematical word problems. Thirty-eight fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students were pretested in mathematics computation and were assigned to experimental or control groups. The control groups received drill…

Data from 149 female members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) were used to construct a composite of the reading habits and their relation to other characterisitics of this group. The typical respondent was a married woman between 26 and 40 years old who had attended college but remained at home to care for children under…

In contrast to research and application of word frequency counts, there has been little or no use of syllable frequency counts. The few syllable counts that have been conducted are not well known, not often used, and not easily obtained. This is unfortunate, because a publicized, easily obtainable, computer syllable analysis would have numerous…

A study was undertaken to delineate and assess the comprehension monitoring activities adults employed when following directions to assemble a model. The study also examined the effects of mode of presentation on such activities. Twenty-six college students were assigned to one of three groups and given a model to assemble. One group received…

The study of the role parents play in the reading development of their children requires a methodology that is unobtrusive, humane, objective, and natural. Ethnography, with its corresponding technique of participant observation, offers these characteristics. The distinctive features of an ethnographic research design include: formulation of the…

A study was conducted to evaluate television commercials based on their reading (or print) content. Commercials aired on the three major networks during Saturday morning programing were viewed for six consecutive weeks. Each commercial was analyzed to determine how it used printed words to sell a product. The results revealed that the printed word…

A study compared cognitive style (field dependence/independence) and learning style (reflection/impulsion) with reading achievement. Twenty-six sixth grade students were administered the group Embedded Figures Test to determine field dependence/independence and the Matching Familiar Figures Test to determine reflective and implusive students.…

The Fry Readability Formula was used to investigate the readability levels of stories contained in basal readers of the 1979 edition of the "Open Court" series for grades one through six. The average readability levels of the stories were then compared to those found in the 1976 edition of the same series. The purposes of the study were…

Although the popular press has reported that college textbooks are becoming easier to read in response to the lowered reading skill level of entering freshmen, a recent study found that newer editions of college texts were more difficult to read than earlier editions of the same texts. A study was undertaken to determine which of the two views was…

Reading teachers of the 1980s need to be confident not only about the key issues but also about their own knowledge of the issues when making decisions. Two issues from the seventies (reading as a developmental process and reading as a psycholinguistic process) combine with the broad notion of textlinguistics as important areas of knowledge for…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…

The approximately 250 entries contained in this annotated bibliography are a representative sample of studies and thinking on reading and learning disabilities appearing in periodicals, proceedings, monographs, and reports of federal and state agencies in the seventies. The entries are presented in three sections: the nature of reading and…

Thirty-six undergraduate students participated in a two-hour experiment that measured the effect of fact and inference text annotation on the integration of information. The subjects were asked to read four pairs of meaningful stories, each of which contained four pairs of related facts about a mythical country. The texts of the experimental group…

In a study designed to relate research on cognitive style to study technique effectiveness, a group of 129 college freshmen was given a test to assess the cognitive style of each. The 93 students who scored in the upper l/3 and in the lower l/3 of the distribution were classified as field independent and field dependent. These 93 students were…