A study was conducted to draw attention to how sixth graders use their leisure time and to suggest some implications for reading and literacy instruction. Subjects were 723 sixth-grade students in six middle schools in Northern California. The sixth-graders completed the California Media and Library Educators Association Literature/Reading Survey…

A study examined students' metacognitive response to ambiguous literacy tasks to determine the relationship between that response and academic achievement. Subjects were 11 students chosen from a fifth-grade classroom in a small, urban school serving a predominantly black, middle class neighborhood. Two literacy tasks were identified as ambiguous:…

A study was designed to test the following experimental alternative hypotheses: (1) that the correlation between listening and reading scores would be negative, or (2) that the correlation would be positive. The study also focused on determining which of the two principal teaching modalities, aural and visual, was the more effective in promoting…

Following up research by Radway and others on readers of romance novels, a study, employing a reader-response approach, was conducted with 18 female adolescent readers of romances to discover if they perceived and enjoyed the novels in ways appreciably different from other readers. The subjects filled out questionnaires about their romance novel…

A study examined whether non-disabled and disabled readers could be differentiated significantly on specifically stated criteria. The more than 70 variables for investigation included personal data, genetic predisposition, developmental milestones, medical history, psycho-social history, and educational background. Subjects were 302 central…

A review of the literature on the use of the computer in teaching reading included studies that centered on basic reading skills and studies that, for the most part, supported the use of computer assisted instruction (CAI) to assist in developing these skills. The research indicated that CAI in reading is effective for a wide variety of reading…

A study investigated the effect of repeated readings of the same connected text on students' attitude toward reading and their reading fluency, determined by accuracy and speed. Forty-two subjects (25 second-grade and 17 third-grade students) from 2 self-contained classrooms in rural Ohio participated in the study. The pretest-posttest control…

This report reviews and evaluates the tradition of assessing early literacy with formal tests. It begins with a historical account of the readiness movement, focusing on the development of formal measures of early literacy and tracing the development of the movement into the 1980s. Next, the paper analyzes in depth tests that are currently…

A study was conducted to explore how children learn to read in kindergarten. The study employed a heuristic model that included entering ability, home background, instructional processes, home support for literacy development, and measures of student ability at the end of kindergarten. Children were tested, whole-day classroom observations were…

A study examined the effectiveness of a community college district-wide reading program designed to foster reading by faculty, students, administrators, and staff. The Reading/Writing across the Curriculum Committee of the Metropolitan Community Colleges selected Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Galapagos," a novel which met criteria as to length,…

A study examined how regular listening to oral reading by teachers affected fourth and sixth grade students' reading comprehension, attitudes towards reading, and time spent doing independent reading. Subjects, 221 students from six diverse school systems in Connecticut, were read to for 20 minutes, three times per week, for 12 weeks. Pre- and…

A key strategy for teaching inferential comprehension was implemented in a seventh-grade classroom of students who were at least one year below grade level in reading. The purpose was to improve the students' inferential comprehension skills. The implementation began with a diagnostic reading test followed by several weeks of introducing different…

This monograph elaborates the interactive definition of reading and illustrates how this process, along with inappropriate instruction, can reinforce poor reading behaviors. The monograph also outlines current instructional procedures and proposes new programmatic solutions. The monograph concludes with a list of premises based on recent reading…

A study examined the effects of adjunct questions on learning. Subjects, 93 male and 78 female sixth-grade students from two junior high schools in small towns located in a largely agricultural region in the Midwest and whose mean grade equivalency on the reading sub-test of the Stanford Achievement Test was 10.2, were monitored by video cameras…

Globally, knowledge of word meanings is related to reading comprehension. R. C. Anderson and P. Freebody's (1981) seminal paper on vocabulary set forth three hypotheses to explain this relationship--an "instrumentalist" hypothesis suggesting that knowledge of word meanings directly causes reading comprehension, and "general…