Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…

Sixty-six children from average and low-ability reading groups in grades one through five participated in a study of the effects of vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension. The children were pretested for their ability to identify words and to supply meanings for the new vocabulary words in the next basal reader story they encountered. The…

Ninety-three first grade children participated in a study that examined the relationship among instructional materials, other factors such as test scores, and the growth and application of letter-sound correspondence knowledge. The study also sought to determine the importance of letter-sound correspondence knowledge in the acquisition and…

The effectiveness of mapping for middle school students was tested, using 11 eighth graders who were taught to map short expository prose passages during approximately 12 hours of instruction. Mapping is an innovative reading comprehension strategy in which students identify the important relationships defining the text structure and re-represent…

Two studies were conducted to test the view that the early reading difficulties experienced by boys result from a "difference" in the way they use language, not their "deficit" in language ability. The first study replicated previous findings that young boys outperform young girls in receptive language ability although they perform less well in…

The Minnesota Reading Examination for College Students and the Minnesota Speed of Reading Test were administered to 865 University of Minnesota freshmen in 1978. When these test results were compared to the scores on the same tests that 1,313 freshmen and 4,191 high school seniors received in 1928, the 1978 students scored significantly lower than…

The procedures used to establish the validity of the Minnesota Reading Assessment (MRA) are described in this paper. The MRA is described as a measure designed for use with students in community colleges, business schools, technical schools, and other secondary and postsecondary training institutions in order to measure student competence in…

Writing, editing, and printing texts for schools has been the accepted role of publishers, while text researchers have concentrated on typography, content, and readability. The hundreds of readability formulas now available make readability the most sophisticated of these three areas. Research in reading comprehension suggests that publishers…

A study was conducted to determine if the responses of elementary school children to questions about the moral dilemmas in fables would reflect developmental trends in moral judgment, along the lines suggested by Jean Piaget. Sixty second, fourth, and sixth grade children listened to three tape-recorded fables and responded orally to questions…

After employees of private firms completed several rapid reading classes and achieved remarkable gains on the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, the question was raised as to whether the increases in scores were due to the increased number of items attempted on the posttest. A preliminary analysis indicated that students attempted an average of 14.6 and…

Two studies investigated the relationships between readability, prior knowledge, and interest in the material being read. In the first study, 169 college freshmen read cloze passages of materials from the Nelson-Denny Reading Tests, then one week later read the whole passages and completed the related multiple choice questions. A control group…

Noting that viewing reading as a communicative act can heighten educators' awareness of the ways in which one story can be embedded within another, this report presents and discusses several examples of stories within stories. The report discusses the various participants communicating in a story within a story--the real and implied authors and…

Adolescent Portuguese-English bilingual students participated in a study that examined the relationship between reading rate and reading comprehension. The 31 subjects were placed in one of three groups: (1) normal readers, reading at grade level as indicated by IQ test scores; (2) slow readers, reading at least two years below expected grade…

Piagetian-type, indepth interviews were used to explore children's thinking at various ages about the process of reading, thereby gaining insights related to cognitive development across the developmental age span. Interview questions and follow-up probes were designed to elicit responses in three categories: definitions and purposes of reading,…

The second in a series concerning some implications of learners' cognitive style for the development of reading competence, this paper explores the relationships between cognitive style and reading achievement, with attention to such factors as the stability and flexibility of cognitive style functions. The paper discusses J. E. Hill's concept of…