A STUDY GROUP ON READING WAS HELD AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA, FROM JANUARY 21 THROUGH JANUARY 26, 1963. THE PURPOSE OF THIS MEETING OF LEADING SCHOLARS, DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM THE FIELDS OF PSYCHOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS, WAS (1) TO EXPLORE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF EXISTING THEORIES AND RESEARCH ON READING, (2) TO DISCUSS ITS…

A study was conducted to examine the comprehension process of ten proficient fourth grade readers as they read a story within a particular instructional environment. The instructional environment was designed to provide for background experiences, purpose for reading, and purposeful feedback. Results indicated that the subjects constructed a great…

Four experiments involving 54 adults were performed to examine the relationship between the effects of story grammar categories and content centrality on subjects' importance ratings, summaries, immediate recall, and delayed recall. Results of the studies indicated that central content units were judged as more important and were better recalled…

A study of reading specialists conducted in 1977 revealed that their diagnostic reliability was very low. Mean diagnostic agreement between two clinicians on statements seen as characterizing a case was effectively zero. Mean agreement for one clinician's diagnostic statements on a case and its replicate over time was less than 0.23. In other…

Conventional wisdom holds that many children experience difficulty when they first read expository material after spending most of their reading time with simple narratives. Unfortunately, there is little available data bearing on this belief, nor is it clear how one would go about testing the claim. The labels "narrative" and…

A study investigated the appropriateness of the "Star Trek" book series for use as recreational reading material for elementary school children. The 12 books were adapted from the television series by James Blish. Appropriateness was determined by evaluating the quality and the readability levels of the books. Quality was ascertained by examining…

Twenty second grade students were tested to determine the possible relationships between concrete operations and reading and between cognitive clarity and reading achievement. The subjects performed six Piagetian conservation tasks and four tasks on cognitive clarity. Reading achievement was based on student records. The data on the relationship…

Two groups of teachers testing with two different informal reading inventories were asked to give explanations for the miscomprehensions of two of their students (selected because of difficulty with comprehension unrelated to word recognition). Teacher explanations reflected diversity in description with the reader's lack of knowledge of key…

A study investigated whether various home and school factors were related to first grade reading gain. Parents of all second grade students in a school district were asked to complete questionnaires eliciting the number of persons living in the household, the strictness of parental discipline, number of hours spent reading to the child each week,…

When 77 college students were asked a certain type of question after every four pages of a 48-page oceanography text that they were reading, it was found that the text information relevant to questions was learned better than text information irrelevant to questions. Furthermore, reading times and probe reaction times on a secondary task were…

The results of two experiments on understanding metaphors were found to be incompatible with the popular view that deaf children have particular problems in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of four alternatives) the…

The purpose of this study was to describe the approach elementary school teachers use when diagnosing reading difficulties in their classrooms. The study examined two models, one depicting a general diagnostic process and one depicting a detailed diagnostic process. In depth interviews were conducted with ten teachers regarding their diagnostic…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

In response to the interest in the potential good that may result from the development and implementation of parent education programs, the Dooly County (Georgia) school district organized several parent education efforts beginning in 1973-74. During the 1976-77 school year, the reading coordinator decided to conduct a parent education program…

Diagnostic tests for nine different letter-sound patterns were developed for the PLATO Computer Assisted Instruction system and were administered to 122 first, second, and third graders. Results for four of the patterns showed low test reliabilities and no monotonic increase for the percentage correct with increasing grade level. The remaining…