A study (conducted in suburban central New Jersey using 218 second graders' California Achievement Test (CAT) scores from 1986-1988 compared the effectiveness of two well-known reading programs. Results indicated that although there was no statistically significant difference in the scores, the mean difference suggested that children who were…

A series of studies addressed basic questions about instruction in subject areas such as science and social studies at the elementary level, focusing on group discussion of textbook content and addressing the effects of instruction in terms of students' knowledge acquisition and their independent reading comprehension of new content. Subjects,…

A study investigated whether the interrelatedness of parents' storybook reading to children and their developing competence in oral and written language carried over into out-of-home care. Subjects, about 40 children ranging in age from 18 to 36 months in 4 representative daycare centers and their 4 adult teachers, were observed during planned…

This 31-item bibliography which ranges from 1981 to 1988 focuses on the special needs of gifted students in the reading classroom and the challenges to the reading teacher to encourage gifted students to stretch intellectually and to develop critical thinking and reading skills. The articles deal with issues related to reading material selection,…

This annotated bibliography, a project undertaken by graduate students enrolled in a comparative reading course at Northern Illinois University, supplements and updated E. Malmquist's annotated bibliography, "Handbook on Comparative Reading." The bibliography contains 188 annotations drawn from a range of articles, chapters, and texts…

An investigation examined student-generated texts in terms of both traditional and more theoretically valid readability to determine what factors influence comprehension when children read their own, peer, and adult-written texts. Seventy dictated stories created in an earlier study, along with 4 first-grade level stories from the "Reader's…

Speech communication theorists have defined certain rhetorical characteristics that may improve the use and production of written texts. In order to determine whether social studies textbooks have rhetorical characteristics--containing both content information and the author's attitudes toward it--and whether these characteristics have the desired…

A study examined the effect of the prereading activity called story impressions on reading comprehension and oral reading miscues of students. Story impressions give clues concerning characters and events in an as yet unread story and ask the students to write a story to make the story fragment comprehensible. Subjects, 60 second grade students…

A study examined the relative merits of characteristics of general modeling when applied to cognitive modeling of reading comprehension processes and whether the characteristics of modeling, when applied to cognitive modeling of reading processes, influence comprehension and comprehension monitoring. Subjects, 100 eighth grade students who could…

The 1985-86 Chapter 1 Corrective Reading Program, which provides supplemental individualized instruction in reading and writing skills for eligible nonpublic school students in grades 1 through 12 in New York City, is the subject of this evaluation report. The background of the program, evaluative criteria, findings and recommendations are…

A study focused on the first phase of a longitudinal program of research designed to investigate the feasibility of constructing reading tests closely articulated with specific reading curricula and consistent with the current scientific understanding of reading processes. Participants, 298 beginning third-grade students, took two types of tests…

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…

To determine how frequently various forms of anaphora appear in materials written for children, 1,000-word excerpts were analyzed from the second, fourth, and sixth grade texts of four basal reader series. The basal programs consisted of the "Ginn Reading Program," the "Houghton Mifflin Reading Program,""Scott, Foresman…

The empirical study of knowledge representation is the focus of this paper, which observes that language as the cognitive instrument in the communication of phenomena must be capable of expressing relations of the observer-observation kind. The paper points out that this implies a coopeartive process at work in the production of a text, of which…

This manual describes the model--specifically the observation procedures and coding systems--used in a longitudinal study of how children learn to comprehend what they read, with particular emphasis on science texts. Included are procedures for the following: identifying students; observing--recording observations and diagraming the room; writing…