Fourth grade students' miscues occurring in signaled sentence combining exercises were compared with their reading miscues in a study relating cognitive style to miscue analysis of reading and writing. The records of 16 students were used, with reflective students and impulsive students so designated on the basis of their miscues per one-hundred…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) the relationships between prior knowledge and passage recall; (2) the effect of a prereading activity (PReP) on available knowledge; and (3) the effect of the PReP activity on total comprehension scores. The subjects were 161 sixth grade students from a middle class suburban Long Island, New York, public…

The eye movements of two college graduates were monitored in a study of flexible reading, which is defined as the ability to adjust one's rate and approach to reading according to the purpose of reading, the difficulty of the material, and one's knowledge of the subject matter. The subjects were told to read an excerpt from a tenth grade biology…

After considering the advent of knowledge about prereading from a longitudinal perspective, this report then reviews the research on preschool children's attempts to read and offers a discussion of cross-sectional research on both prereading and beginning reading. The discussion is organized in terms of three hypothesized strands of prereading:…

A study examined the main and interacting effects of pragmatic, structural, and word-level manipulations of text on comprehension and compared the results to the effects of these variables on judgments of text comprehensibility and interest. Subjects were 120 seventh grade students who read a number of passages that differed in level of…

Stressing that it is necessary to have information about the quality of eye movement data in order to judge the degree of confidence one should have in the results of an experiment using eye movement records as data, this report suggests ways for assessing and reporting such information. Specifically, the report deals with three areas: (1)…

Developmental differences in preschool children's abilities to communicate about basic and subordinate level semantic contrasts were examined in a referential communication situation. Twenty-four three, four, and five-year-old children communicated with children of the same age and adults about pictures' referents. Speakers talked about one…

According to Dolores Durkin, reading comprehension instruction can be defined as activities in which the teacher does or says something to help children understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word. Carol Hodges criticized Durkin's emphasis on direct verbal instruction and broadened the definition to include…

A study investigated the effect of using read-along materials on the acquisition of incidental sight reading vocabulary for prereaders and beginning readers. Specifically, the study examined whether such readers acquired sight vocabulary words from exposure to read-along materials and the types of words that were learned more readily than others.…

Fifty-four first grade students comprising eight reading groups in three separate classrooms participated in a study that examined effective and appropriate communication in peer-directed groups. Specifically, the study investigated selected aspects of requests for information and action and their relationship to language ability, social…

An experiment was designed to determine whether kindergarten children could recognize the authorship of a piece of prose by the style of the writing. Specifically, the experiment examined whether, at the age when reading instruction typically begins, children are capable of appreciating stylistic properties of text that are almost universally…

This report provides an analysis of data from the 1978-79 school year that was collected in an evaluation of reading materials used for instructional purposes in grades one through six of the District of Columbia public schools. Following a discussion of the scope and purpose of the evaluation project, the report provides findings that address the…

A study was conducted using contemporary test scores to describe adults who reported that they had experienced severe reading problems in childhood and that such problems continued to influence their functioning as adults. Twelve men and one woman ranging in age from 20 to 54 volunteered for the study. All had attended college or technical school…

This report is the second in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. In the first part, a model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts was described and applied to a number of experiments. This second part applies the same model to a number of new experiments designed to…

This is the fourth of six volumes providing information drawn from a project designed to compile a substantial data base on reading errors for use by researchers and teachers. This volume contains transcriptions of oral reading error studies conducted with fifth grade students. The transcriptions are organized according to grade and…