A study was conducted to investigate the long term transfer effect of metaphoric allusion used to clarify unfamiliar subject matter. Forty-nine high school students were given unfamiliar prose materials variously augmented by metaphoric allusion. The subjects' immediate performance on a transfer task was compared to their performance on an…

A study was conducted to test the revisionist theory which holds that students are channeled into good or poor reading groups, depending on the socioeconomic status of their parents as perceived by the teacher. The theory also maintains that there is a detrimental lack of mobility between groups within a given class and from grade to grade. The…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of the "Cherry Hill Study Skills Program" on eighth grade students' reading comprehension and study skills. The "Cherry Hill Study Skills Program" is a process oriented course dealing with the sequential development of nine specific skills deemed essential to the retrieval and retention of information…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship of fiction reading to adult development. Eighty students at an adult education center completed questionnaires that elicited information concerning their reading of fiction and their adult experiences, as well as demographic information. The results yielded a picture of a group of adult readers…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of applying the "Swassing/Barbe Modality Index" (SBMI), an instrument for identifying a student's strongest learning modality, to achieve higher accuracy on spelling lessons and tests. The SBMI was administered to 17 special education students in a class of seven second grade and ten third…

The purpose of this study was to examine theories of reading comprehension and instruction as they relate to instructional practices in the middle grades. Following an extensive review of literature in the theoretical areas upon which reading programs are normally based--reading, language, learning, and teaching--specific characteristics within…

Thirty-six students participated in a study of a program designed to help first-year medical students construct an ideational scaffolding as they attempted to understand their texts. They were divided into two groups: an experimental group that was given an instructional program on how to develop a hierarchical structure while reading, and a…

A total of 107 Arkansas kindergarten teachers responded to a questionnaire designed to identify their attitudes and practices. The questionnaire elicited information concerning the teachers' experiential background, the methods and materials they used to teach reading skills, the prereading and reading skills taught, and their opinions about…

The effects of vocabulary instruction on word knowledge and reading comprehension were assessed in three experiments. In experiment one, employing 12 "average" fourth grade readers, and experiment two, employing six learning disabled intermediate level students, word synonyms were taught to pairs of students on three consecutive days.…

To determine whether poor readers employ less efficient strategies in processing logical connectives than do good readers, 34 ninth grade students participated in a study. Half of the students were good readers and half were poor readers. An acquisition list consisting of 18 target sentences and 6 fillers was constructed. A list of 42 recognition…

A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

Twenty subjects from the United States and nineteen from India read letters describing a typical Indian and a typical American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. Among the findings were that subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally…

Three methods of preposed questioning aimed at improving student comprehension of short stories were tested with a group of high school students. The methods were as follows: teacher-prepared, preposed questions, self-preposed questions (student-prepared), and schema self-preposed questions (embodying teacher-specified limitations within which…

The objectives of this study were to identify and evaluate strategies for organizing prose content that appear appropriate for real-life training applications. An analysis of prose passages in a typical high school science text identified three basic types of graphic representations: associative (AR), comparative (CR), and directed (DR). Once…

Recent research in reading comprehension suggests that there are substantial differences between individuals in their patterns of resource allocation to text-based (bottom-up) and knowledge-based (top-down) reading processes. Less able readers tend to overrely on processes in one direction, producing deleterious effects on comprehension. Factors…