Two studies concerning the language-stimulation value of pictures for children were conducted. The first study tested the validity of a formula that classifies pictures as having high, medium, or low potency, based on the amount of language they stimulate in viewers. (The formula takes into account factors such as the number of animals, people,…

Random samples were drawn from the city directories of Columbus, Nebraska, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, for a study of the ability of readers to detect and differentiate between straight news and editorials. Each respondent completed a Likert-type instrument, which had a split-half reliability of 0.87. Analyses indicated that there were…

The present study investigated the effects of repetitions and questions (without feedback) at varying lags during self-paced learning from text. High school students read a series of unrelated paragraphs, each of which was repeated or tested after a variable lag. In a mixed condition, texts and repetitions of particular sentences were combined…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the positions of editors of journals who were sent a questionnaire designed to investigate (1) policies concerning acceptance rates, major reasons for rejection, lag times to publication and (2) the implications of trends for efforts to disseminate scholarly work. Questionnaires were sent to 106…

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument or instruments to measure the attitudes toward reading of children in grades one through six. The Likert-type scale was chosen as the most appropriate type of instrument to meet established criteria. Two rural schools and two urban schools with normally distributed populations according to…

Focusing on readability and interest factors of instructional materials for adult education, the study examined the possible relationships between performance and expressed interest in individual reading passages and in categories of passages. Passages on one of three levels of difficulty were administered to 180 adult education students from…

This investigation was conducted to determine the extent to which the Caldecott books stereotype the role of the human, animal and inanimate female image. The findings suggest: that in one case, when measured by a content analysis form, the rater's perception of the stereotyping of the human, animal and inanimate female characters in the texts…

Language features which occur for the first time ("new" words and structures) in each story of Blocks 1 and 2 of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Reading Program are identified and discussed. The features were drawn from those defined and presented in Fiege-Kollmann's (1972) analysis of Blocks 1 and 2 stories. The new words and structures…

This paper is a summary description of the Peabody College Right to Read Teacher Preparation Project. The goals of the project are to plan, implement, and evaluate a replicable model for the improvement of the preservice reading program and to develop a program that prepares teachers for work in a wide variety of settings. Project objectives are…

The purpose of this study was to compare mature readers' comprehension of text presented in traditional orthography with their comprehension of text presented in a regularized orthography, specifically, to determine whether, when traditional orthography is regularized, any loss of meaning is attributable to the loss of the visual dissimilarity of…

The purposes of this study were to identify the best predictor or predictors of paragraph comprehensibility and to attempt to interpret that predictor as a skill. Forty-two passages of differing readability (ranging from grade 2.5 to 10.0) were analyzed for within word, within sentence, and between sentence characteristics. The measures used for…

The purpose of this study was to isolate factors responsible for the discrepant results reported in the advanced organizer literature, and to identify processes children employ when attempting to recall connected verbal materials. The subjects were 64 middle-class children randomly selected from a local school system. An equal number of male and…

The ability of 50 kindergarten children to discriminate and produce the phonemes typically used in early phonic-based reading instruction was investigated in matching-to-sample discrimination task and an echoic production task. The phonemes were presented to each child in isolation and in a word context in both tasks. The average time required to…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of various strategies for improving the reading comprehension of readers with deficits in decoding and vocabulary skills. Ninety-six subjects (48 deficit readers and 48 average readers) of approximately the same age and intelligence were selected from a lower socioeconomic middle…

The purpose of this study was to examine the degree of forgetting of meaningful information learned to 90% criterion by thirty-nine college students in two introductory reading methods classes in the word recognition (exclusive of phonics) module of those classes. The amount of information gained was compared to forgetting to determine the percent…