Reveals that the Rauding Scale of Prose Difficulty provides results closer to Spache and Dale-Chall values than does the Singer Eyeball Estimate of Readability (SEER) technique. (FL)

Reveals that portrayals of handicapped individuals occur far less frequently in basal readers than they do in children's literature. (FL)

Previous conclusions regarding the negative effect of illustration on learning to read are challenged. Clarity is also sought on the issue of the effect of illustration on comprehension. (Author/KC)

Reports the findings of a longitudinal study of the impact of literacy on the occupations and schooling of students who were judged to be low reading readiness in first grade. (FL)

Analyzes alternative cloze forms derived from selected deletion strategies, scoring procedures, and blank conditions for respective effects on the cloze test performance of college-level readers. (HOD)

Develops a text-specific prior knowledge measure that predicts the likelihood of a student's success in recalling the content of a reading passage. (HOD)

Argues that peer-assisted learning is a good option for teachers concerned with providing as much individual help as possible to their students. Describes one such peer tutoring program. (FL)

Reports on a study in which a heterogenous group of college students completed questionnaires in which they described their reading experiences in order to determine their physical and mental experiences while reading two short stories. (HOD)

Concludes that substituting easy for difficult vocabulary words makes text easier to comprehend, and that redundant information in a text contributes to successful text comprehension. (AEA)

Concludes that there is a strong positive relationship between an elementary school's organizational climate (whether the school is "open" or "closed") and student reading performance, with achievement being greater in the more open schools. (FL)

Describes two experiments that were conducted to determine the relative influence of text data and prior knowledge on the kinds of inferences children make when answering questions about stories. (HOD)

Presents computational and psychophysical evidence in support of a theory of one of the earliest stages of visual processing in reading--the isolation of words in text. (HOD)

Describes three experiments that investigated the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence. Concludes that context can affect within-sentence processes in comprehension. Test materials used in the experiments are appended. (FL)

Discusses the effectiveness of two techniques of teaching vowel knowledge--the vowel-in-isolation approach and the phonogram approach. (FL)

Concludes that branched stories, which involve the reader actively in a story, can produce better attitudes toward reading on the part of elementary school students than stories from basal readers. (FL)