Using an approach to classroom research that D. Newman (1990) has termed a formative experiment, a study investigated the effects of engaging elementary school students in creating computer-based multimedia reviews of books they read independently. Formative experiments are designed to investigate how an instructional intervention can be…

This publication (one of a series) contains 19 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are: "Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?" (Maria Mody and others); "Auditory…

A study examined whether sixth grade students taught formal study skills would obtain significantly higher reading achievement than those not taught these skills. Study skills can be broken down into ten or more skill areas including: study habits, time management, test taking, lecture notetaking, reading comprehension, vocabulary, test anxiety,…

A study examined 52 stories for grades 1-6, randomly chosen from 10 American and Canadian literature-based reading series containing well-known selections by well-known authors. The study compared the reading series selection to the original story cited in the series acknowledgments, seeking patterns of difference in wording, paragraph structure,…

A longitudinal qualitative study examined the variety and scope of literacy experiences in the homes of families from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Original participants were 41 children enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs during the 1992-93 school year and their families from public elementary schools serving Baltimore City neighborhoods…

The 1994 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Reading Assessment was administered to a national sample of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. National reading proficiency results were reported for students at each grade and within various subgroups of the population. State-level results were reported for individual states or…

Noting that children must be provided with the opportunity to read various types of text as early as possible if they are to develop into strategic and self-directed readers, this paper presents research evidence to show that every text type makes unique demands on readers. The first section of the paper discusses reading in the school context,…

A study examined how beliefs and attitudes influence the processing of information: people tend to distort contradictory information to make it consistent with their pre-existing beliefs and attitudes and to use it to bolster their initially held convictions. The study addressed the degree to which people believed that HIV causes AIDS. Subjects,…

A study tested whether an intervention involving collaboration and the integration of reading and writing would build sixth-grade students' schemata for comparison/contrast and cause/effect text. Subjects were 76 students in 7 sixth-grade classes in 2 urban middle schools. Four of the classes were randomly chosen as the treatment group. For the…

A study determined the effect of shared writing activities on reading comprehension. The subjects, 40 second- and third-grade students from a suburban school in Mercer County, West Virginia, completed the Reading Comprehension Subtest of the Comprehension Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) for grade 2 as a pretest. A control group of 20 students were…

A study examined the theory that partially independent deficits in phonemic awareness and symbol naming speed contribute to reading disability. Subjects of the study were chosen from six second-grade classrooms to represent poor and average readers, rather than a regular class distribution. On the basis of AAT (phonemic deletion scores) and DNS…

A study examined primary school teachers' matching of instructional reading methods to models of reading difficulties and how often they used each activity in their classrooms. Subjects were 39 primary school teachers from the northeast section of a Great Lakes, midwestern state. For the study, teachers characterized each reading method according…

A study examined children's theme comprehension of non-religious moral children's stories. The study used 3 tasks of ascending difficulty: (1) selecting the moral theme when it is found in a multiple-choice context; (2) identifying the story-with-the-same-message when the message is found in a new context; and (3) moral message construction (a…

A 2-year longitudinal study investigated the causal contributions of phonological processing to early reading competency. Subjects, 161 kindergarten children, were tested with a battery of measures assessing letter knowledge, reading ability, and 5 phonological constructs: rapid naming ability, rhyming ability, phonological memory (successive…

A qualitative longitudinal study, first of four parts, compared developmental movement levels and academic learning levels in young children. Subjects were 28 children of various ages who were not working up to grade level but who did not qualify for learning disability services. Parents completed a detailed demographic survey and a neurological…