College students were compared to adults for their reading comprehension of news items on two critical issues of national concern. The subjects were 109 adults and 97 college students who read ten short magazine articles on the Iran-United States hostage crisis and the U.S. energy problem. After reading the articles, the subjects' comprehension…

The individualized developmental reading laboratory program described in this monograph was designed to supplement regular reading instruction in grades four and five. Information is provided on the instructional procedures used in the program, with emphasis on instruction given through teacher comments written in individual students' folders.…

A study was conducted to determine whether interjudge reliabilities on assignments of comprehension questions to the Barrett Taxonomy categories could be attained and whether the taxonomy could be used as a criterion to assess varying levels of reading comprehension questions in various reading textbooks. A total of 623 questions from three fourth…

While reading has been recognized as a potentially useful and enjoyable pastime for the elderly, physical and psychological decrements affect the ability of the elderly to read. As the eyes age, near-point tasks become more difficult. In addition to reduced sensory intake, perceptual changes occur. The central nervous system slows, and data travel…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

The importance of metacognition to the process of critical reading is discussed in this report. Specifically, the report covers two areas of research: (1) reading for meaning, which involves the metacognitive activity of comprehension monitoring, and (2) reading for remembering, which includes identifying important ideas, testing one's mastery of…

Data from 80 junior high school students who completed the Assessment of Language and Reading Maturity (ALARM) test battery were used to delineate elements within the concept of mature reading comprehension. Stepwise multiple regression analyses were performed on the 15 ALARM test factors to isolate both the principal elements and the "trace…

Thirty-eight college students were the subjects of a study designed to examine the efficacy of training graduate reading specialists through a diagnosis simulation program versus the use of a traditional child study approach. The major task of this investigation was to compare, by way of univariate or multivariate analysis, various combinations of…

A study was conducted to determine whether students at different grade levels could use categorical cues to encode information from prose text. Sixty college students, 74 high school students, 96 junior high school students, and 108 third grade students read a 12-paragraph passage containing two references to color and number per paragraph. The…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of sentence length, sentence structure, and word frequency on the readability of textbook prose. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which the factors, taken alone or in combination, affected the readability of two 1,000-word college textbook passages when the content remained the same. Two…

A study was conducted to provide an understanding of teacher decision making as it shaped the course of reading instruction. Specifically, through an analytical description of the patterns of teacher decision making, the study sought to identify and classify the decisions four teachers made and to describe how those decisions were reflected in…

This guide presents a classroom problem solving model designed to help teachers conduct their own classroom research. It suggests developing a procedure for identifying the instructional problems influencing reading achievement. The model is presented in steps that can be used independently or in concert with other steps. Practice activities are…

Ten reading skills were selected to represent literal, interpretive, and critical reading. An objective test was constructed for each of eight skills, and published tests were used for the remaining two. Complete data were available on 220 upper intermediate children. Using a series of multiple regression analyses it was concluded that a…

This study investigated the effects of graphic advance organizers and schematic cognitive-mapping organizers upon the comprehension of 146 ninth grade students of below-average reading ability. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: graphic advance organizer, schematic cognitive-map organizer, and control. A 15-item, informal…

This study compared the reading interests and habits of American and Canadian senior high school students and examined the extent to which the English curricula in their schools coincide with those reading interests. Questionnaires were distributed to a total of 680 students in three schools (urban, suburban, and rural) in the New Britain,…