Reporting recent and significant studies across the spectrum of the literacy movement to help plan the United States' literacy future, this book discusses the history of the adult literacy movement, especially in the United States, and the emergent definitions of adult literacy. The book also reports on the scholarship about, practice of, and…

A study compared the teaching methods of basal readers to writing/reading integration as they effect reading comprehension. Forty fourth-grade students from an urban area of New England completed the Reading Comprehension Subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) for grade 3 as a pretest. A control group of 20 students were…

Studies from the interactive perspective regard reading and writing as processes which share a common knowledge base and have similar mental operations. First, according to this model, reading and writing are both interactive processes. Second, both readers and writers go through the same activities as planning, drafting, aligning, revising,…

Student attitudes toward instructional strategies affect their interest in the subject and may raise or lower motivation. A pilot study assessed students' attitudes toward 27 different strategies frequently used for reading instruction. Subjects, 28 second-grade students, completed a Likert-type rating scale with faces instead of numbers to…

A study investigated the relationship between reading achievement and predictive abilities for narrative text structure of 96 fourth grade and 70 sixth grade readers. The subjects (1) silently read incomplete stories and then told the rest orally, and (2) silently read stories that had parts deleted and then orally gave information they thought…

To ascertain the current state-of-the-art clinical experiences provided by colleges and universities granting graduate degrees in reading education, a seven-page survey form was mailed to all schools listed in "Graduate Programs and Faculty in Reading, 1981." Questions were designed to obtain information on the following topics: size of college,…

Research discoveries over the past 15 years concerning reading comprehension have had a significant impact on reading instruction, particularly schema theory. This theory, based on prior learning, which states that the reader uses the text to construct a meaning within his or her own mind, affects what teachers can do to help students improve…

Designed to improve underachieving high school students' reading and communication skills, the Secondary Developmental Reading program served 909 ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders in 13 Ohio schools. Funding was made available through the Ohio Disadvantaged Pupil Program Fund (DPPF). Nine teachers from eight high schools participated in the…

Divided into two phases, a study investigated the differential effects of text with and without logical connectives on college developmental readers' comprehension. In the first phase, 44 sophomores from two sections of a college developmental reading course were administered a cloze comprehension exercise along with a class of 50 regular…

For the purpose of examining the relationship between preschool children's level of literacy development and the contextualization of story content to the children's world knowledge, a study was conducted investigating how parents of high and low print aware children contextualize stories for them in terms of their prior knowledge. The study…

Presented in three sections, this document contains recommendations based on the conclusions drawn in the Commission on Reading's final report "Becoming a Nation of Readers." Results reported generally indicate that many of America's students could become skilled readers if (1) teachers improved reading instruction, (2) parents spent…

A year-long, quasi-experimental study investigated the comparative effects of a whole language approach and a code emphasis approach upon the emergent literacy of 53 girls in two kindergarten classes in an all girls' parochial school in the Northeast. Subjects in the experimental class received instruction in Holdaway's Shared Book Experience…

Examining SQ3R research from 1953-1984, this paper provides an update of an earlier review of the literature that was taken from the ERIC database, "Psych Abstracts," and "Dissertation Abstracts." The paper divides the studies by educational level: elementary, junior and senior high school, and college/university. It presents…

As part of an effort to discover what was being done with comprehension instruction in classrooms, basal reader manuals, and reading methodology textbooks, an analysis was made of the content of eight reading methods textbooks that had copyright dates at least as recent as 1983 and that were the most frequently used texts. All the pages in the…

A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test…