This study investigates the effect of word frequency on reading comprehension, in relation to type of content, vocabulary instruction method, student sex, and question type. Subjects, 120 sixth-grade readers, responded to three types of comprehension questions after reading two types of stories. Each subject had previously received one of three…

Research studies on the affective elements of reading ability show a definite relationship between self concept and reading achievement in children. Based on these findings, this study investigated the relationship between reading achievement, self concept level, and perception of reading ability in college freshmen. Forty-six students from a…

Rather than abandon reading expectancy formulae because they produce different reading expectancy scores, educators should attempt to improve such formulae in order to make appropriate decisions about students. Potential reading levels derived from the use of various expectancy formulae may be compared after converting the scores to stanines,…

Prestige-suggestion, the effect that the prestige or reputation of a source has on a receiver, is the subject of this paper. Three research studies which have been done recently by researchers in reading are reported. These studies asked the following questions: If consumers evaluate products by means of reading store advertisements, will they be…

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. In experiment one, the target sentences followed either short or long contexts which induced either literal interpretations or metaphorical ones. Results indicated that only in the short context…

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

Based on the assumption that the active involvement of the reader is required to give meaning to the printed word, a study was devised to test whether reading comprehension can be increased if students are taught to formulate questions about what they read. The study had three phases: a pilot study during which fifth grade top readers were…

Brown and Barclay (1976) trained educable retarded children to use either of two memory search strategies, Anticipation or Rehearsal, involving a self-checking component. Following the training, both their free recall performance and their ability to estimate their readiness for a recall test improved significantly. In the present research, the…

To determine whether poor readers can predict as well as good readers when they read easy material and to determine the effect of material difficulty on predictive ability, a study involving 140 tenth and eleventh graders was conducted. The subjects were randomly selected, with 70 good readers chosen from students who scored at stanines 7, 8, or 9…

In an examination of elementary school children's notions of reading, 1,122 first through sixth graders were individually interviewed. Each child was asked to define reading, and their responses were placed into four categories: those which were vague or irrelevant, those which focused on classroom procedure or the educational value of reading,…

Some 360 elementary teachers and reading specialists participated in this study, which sought to develop an inventory of specific behaviors in the teaching of reading. Factor-analytic and Q-sort techniques were used to identify 20 factors in the final 180-item inventory. Analyses of teachers' ratings of the items indicated that differences in…

This report summarizes studies of perceptual, decoding, and lexical stages of processing in reading. Using a letter identification task, it was found that subjects who were low in overall reading ability scan a visual image more slowly than do high ability readers and are slower in identifying letters when they do not occur in a familiar sequence.…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

A framework for viewing human text comprehension, memory, and recall is presented that assumes patterns of abstract conceptual relations are used to guide processing. These patterns consist of clusters of knowledge that encode prototypical co-occurrences of situations and events in narrative texts. The patterns are assumed to be a part of a…