An informal study examined the impact of a simple behavior modification procedure on the reading habits of second and fifth grade students. Behavior modification theory was pared down to two rules ("reinforce proper behavior" and "reinforce anything close to proper behavior") so that no additional burdens would be placed on…

A study examined basic reading skills among men in prison, comparing poor and adequate readers with respect to comprehension, decoding, short-term memory, and speech perception. Subjects, 88 inmates of normal intelligence, normal hearing, and no significant speech abnormalities, at a minimum-security prison, were given reading comprehension tests…

This monograph is based on research designed to (1) identify the vocabulary words introduced at each grade level by the basal reader series adopted by the Georgia Board of Education; (2) determine the extent of overlap among the books is the series; (3) compare these lists with other recognized word lists; and (4) generated a list of words for the…

A study was conducted to describe and compare the oral responses of three adolescents to two short stories and two textbook selections and to identify their general expectations for reading and responding to fiction and exposition. Three tenth grade girls were interviewed about their family lives, interests, preferences for and experiences with…

A study examined the relationship between sex differences and the development of reading proficiency, specifically investigating if sex differences related to achievement on measures of silent reading comprehension, sight vocabulary, recognition of vocabulary in context, and use of structural analysis in word recognition taken separately or in…

To determine how much prior knowledge affects students' performance on a reading comprehension test, a study was undertaken to examine the prior knowledge factor in a reading competency test developed for college freshmen in New Jersey. The passages used in this test are based on common, everyday topics. Subjects were students in two sections of a…

Individuals in 14 job categories at the Analytical Instrument Division of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation were observed and interviewed for six months to determine their reading practices at work and in leisure settings. The individuals ranged from a research chemist and a printed circuit designer, to a quality assurance inspector and a mechanical…

To determine if measures of the frequency of English root words can serve as reliable predictors of knowledge of those words, a 98-item multiple choice vocabulary test, in which all of the items were English root words, was administered to 46 third graders and 45 fourth graders. The percentage of correct responses for the words was correlated with…

Knowledge of derivational morphology can aid readers in the analysis and acquisition of new vocabulary, in lexical access, and in establishing the syntactic structure of sentences. A study investigated good and poor readers' knowledge and use of derivational suffixes in establishing sentence level syntax. Subjects, 123 10th and 11th grade…

In an effort to understand why pictures are used to supplement learning material, a study explored (1) the role of humor in recall, and (2) whether the effects of humor are independent of the individual's ability level. Subjects--students from either the high SAT (approximate average of 1200 points) population (HS), or the low SAT (approximate…

Intended to help parents and teachers select books for young people that reflect the actual interests of adolescents, this booklet discusses titles that both appeal to teenagers and help adults gain insight into their needs, their concerns, and their values. Titles of chapters in the booklet are as follows: (1) "Are Young Adult Books…

A study using a biasing paradigm examined four hypotheses regarding specific mechanisms thought to underlie the Assimilation-plus-Correction (A-C) theory of schema-text interactions. According to this theory, the ideas implied by a schema (type-1 ideas) are thought to be assimilated and obscured, while those ideas representing novel information…

Unproven beliefs about the process of reading and its instruction and about the effects of maturation and social structure on learning have obscured the question of what children know about how to read. An alternate conceptualization proposes that to learn to read children must obtain experience in three reading contexts: the use of print and its…

Since derivatives are more likely to occur in expository or informational prose than in fictional, literary prose, a study was conducted to test the hypothesis that systematic contextual development of vocabulary is more apt to occur in informational selections than in fictional literary ones. The teaching of prefixes and the use of prefixed words…

A review of German research studies on dyslexia since 1970 found 70 studies that were either empirical investigations or new theoretical perspectives on already existing data. These studies were then classified according to whether they were explicitly or implicitly related to educational procedures and according to their inherent assumptions…