To gather information about reading as it relates to older adults, 267 people, ranging in age from 60 to 93 years, were asked to complete questionnaires. Specific information elicited concerned reading habits, reading materials, time spent in reading daily, time spent watching television, reading interests, preferred television shows, and reading…

This report documents a series of studies on how undergraduate students learn from and reason with textual information. The studies described were undertaken to produce models that could serve as the basis for designing computer systems capable of structuring and presenting text material in optimal formats. Divided into sections, the report…

Two experiments investigated individual differences in semantic recall of expository text. In the first experiment, fourth grade students of superior and average ability read and recalled a prose passage that had been analyzed for its semantic and logical content with a content structure grammar. Unlike past research results, the superior…

A total of 158 children from seven kindergarten classes participated in a study that compared the effectiveness of a context emphasis approach for teaching sight words with an approach that emphasized the distinctive features of the words presented alone. Within classes, the students were assigned in equal numbers to the treatment conditions:…

Sixty undergraduate students read and summarized eight short passages in a study of how semantic components were involved in text comprehension. After the first summary was completed (the naive or untutored summary), the students were assigned to one of three groups. The experimental group was introduced to the semantic components, including…

A reading test and three cloze tests (English, health, and social studies passages with fifth/sixth grade readability levels) were administered to 410 ninth grade students to study the relationship between cloze errors and reading ability. Six types of incorrect responses were considered: synonymous, syntactically acceptable but semantically…

This annual publication contains summaries of more than 1,100 reading research reports that appeared in print between July 1, 1978 and June 30, 1979. The summaries are arranged into six major categories. The first category contains a listing of other general bibliographies offering summaries of reading research, while the second category presents…

This report describes the work of the text analysis groups of the Center for the Study of Reading, whose goals are to investigate the problem of reading comprehension from the standpoint of comparing properties of texts to the difficulty or ease of reading and to construct appropriate theories to account for text properties. The text analysis…

This paper discusses the role of reading in the lives of high school students and discusses research that suggests ways to motivate adolescents to read. Research reviewed in the paper indicates that the major factors that influence adolescent reading are gender, age or maturity, intelligence, and socioeconomic background. The summary of the…

A three-way mixed factorial design was used in a study of the ways good and poor readers used context in cloze tasks. Reading ability (good versus poor readers) and booklet format (sentence versus sentence fragment presentation) served as between-subject factors, while context (whole versus partial passage) served as a within-subject factor.…

Two studies were undertaken to continue a line of research designed to identify the subskills of word identification that correlate most highly with reading comprehension and to develop empirically based instruments to assess those subskills. The issues studied related to the broad area of structural analysis and concerned assessment of skills in…

The effectiveness of different frequencies of summarization during studying and processing prose passages was compared. The 48 college students in the study were equally divided into a control group (normal study techniques), a frequent summarization group that created four noncumulative summaries at equally spaced intervals throughout the passage…

The effectiveness of previewing versus discourse analysis as methods of reading instruction was tested. Previewing (supported by schema theory) was based on the premise that helping students relate their knowledge to the content of a reading selection would facilitate comprehension. Discourse analysis (based on research on text structures)…

A study was undertaken (1) to determine if a relationship existed between preadolescents' levels of reading comprehension as defined by T. C. Barrett's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and their levels of moral development according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stage sequence and (2) to discover if females demonstrated higher levels of reading…

Mexican university students enrolled in a general English course were administered a battery of tests including a reading comprehension test based on a Spanish text, one based on an English text, and the TEAL test battery of English language proficiency for adult students. Half the students were given an easy English text and a difficult Spanish…