Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

A study examined whether pictures presented in advance of reading a text (advance organizers) as compared to pictures presented after reading a text (postorganizers) would significantly enhance the reader's retention of the text's content. Sixty college students rated their familiarity with six topics, then read materials presented on the three…

A study investigated whether fluency in oral reading, as indicated by proper intonation, could be used as a measure of college students' reading comprehension. The study was designed to look at the three features of intonation--pitch, stress, and juncture--separately and in combination to determine whether any one or a combination of all the…

A conceptual framework of attention can be organized around three functions of attention: determining how much capacity is to be deployed (attention allocation), for how long (attention maintenance), and to which potential information sources (attention direction). Within this framework, several critical distinctions can be made between processes…

A study investigated (1) the effectiveness of giving instructions to form mental images prior to reading a text and at the conclusion of the text, and (2) sex differences in the ability of below average readers to form mental images. Subjects were 47 sixth grade students who were below average readers. The subjects were randomly assigned, by sex,…

A study examined the factors that seemed to affect the way teachers adapted the critical components of content area reading innovations that were presented to them in a 3-year staff development project. In the first year of the project, 23 high school content area teachers were interviewed concerning their use, in content area reading instruction,…

Four inquiries were conducted to provide some initial feedback on the operation of the Directed Activities Related to Text Project. Three were concerned with aspects of process and examined such problems as the ways in which the actual course of a text-based lesson reflects the objectives of the project, and how such a lesson can be shown to…

In the Netherlands, explicit beginning reading instruction usually starts in grade one. The children learn grapheme-phoneme correspondences, blending, and phonemic analysis. However, some children experience difficulties in beginning reading that the existing educational procedures are not adequate to resolve. One possible solution being…

Research has shown that secondary school teachers are generally unable to rank text passages accurately according to their reading difficulty. To determine if this was true of elementary and middle school personnel, 177 teachers, administrators, and supervisors attending a summer reading workshop were asked to rank order each of five 100-word…

To provide some understanding of current reading methodology, this paper traces the history of reading instruction from ancient times to pre-Revolutionary America and examines the influences exerted upon that instruction by religion. The major portion of the paper discusses the cultures, religions, and educational systems of ancient Egypt;…

Forty-six members of the college of education at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were surveyed to determine the status of reading instruction within that college. The faculty members taught a total of 114 courses in six departments: health and physical education, vocational education, recreation, special education, elementary…

Working under the hypothesis that a child's concept of a story and his or her concept of the task of narration used to tap comprehension emerge first in social interaction, a methodology was created for studying the process of development from dependent functioning in social interaction to independent functioning based on L. Vygotsky's theoretical…

A study was conducted to gain insight into the question answering abilities of good and poor readers by comparing how well they answered questions when their prior knowledge was at two different levels (high, low) and in four different states. These states of prior knowledge consisted of the ways in which answers to the questions were stored in…

A study was conducted to determine whether a home based parent involvement reading program would (1) increase the frequency with which parents engaged in reading activities with their children, and (2) improve the children's reading attitudes and achievement. Divided into experimental and control groups, 240 7- and 8-year-old children were…

A study investigated the theory that the affective dimension of words can have a significant effect on the process of word recognition. Specifically, the study examined whether word potency (the emotional impact of a word), frequency, and certain graphic characteristics affected word recognition in the parafoveal field under very brief exposure…