A study was undertaken to address the question of how an undergraduate reading specialization program for preservice teachers affected the theoretical orientation of students enrolled in it. The program in question required students to complete seven courses. For purposes of the study, the coursework was divided into three components: an…

Features of a model of reading that is both sensitive to individual differences and consistent with the assumption that reading processes are interactive are discussed in this report. A description of how this model accounts for individual differences in reading skill suggests three types of reading problems: slow word decoding, slow sentence…

A study was conducted to determine the stability of the effect of sex-typed reading material on the reading interests and comprehension of fifth grade boys and girls. It involved a direct replication of a 1967 study so that a comparison of data from the 312 subjects of that study could be made with the data from 374 subjects of 1979. Reading…

The increased interest in reading comprehension by researchers in fields other than reading education is noted in this paper. In addition, the concerns of the new researchers in reading are described, some of the terms they are using are explained, and the implications of their findings for reading instruction are explored. The interests of…

A study was conducted to compare five different techniques for determining the best means of assessing a reader's background knowledge and for discovering if it is possible to elicit different amounts of information from the same subject by simply varying techniques. Subjects were 32 third through sixth grade students, divided into groups of…

The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction,…

A six-year-long study investigated the reading instructional strategies used by elementary school teachers and identified those strategies used by effective and less effective teachers. At two-year intervals, all third and sixth grade teachers who taught reading in self-contained classrooms were classified as high, average, or low effective…

The development of certain cognitive skills to a certain level may be necessary to acquire beginning reading skills. A review of research on cognitive skill development and beginning reading revealed that only a few studies investigated the need for ascertaining the presence of some cognitive processing abilities before reading instruction is…

Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether the results of previous research on rhymes detection were due to a rhyme production frequency bias (in favor of similar rhymes) in the materials used. The previous results had indicated that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more rapidly than dissimilar rhymes. In the three…

A study was designed to measure the relationship between learning to read and learning to write at the elementary school level. Measures of phonics knowledge, reading vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension, and grammatical and organizational complexity of writing were administered to 256 second grade and 253 fifth grade students. The findings…

This paper reports the results of a survey of 60 librarians and teachers in Texas as to what they felt were the most often read adolescent and adult novels, and what adolescent and adult novels they would most recommend. Following a description of the methodology for the study, the paper presents some of the subjects' comments about the…

The Program Analysis and Monitoring in Reading (PAM) package helps teachers and administrators anlayze, understand, and improve school reading programs by providing them with monitor reports and program reports. Both types of reports include results of student performance on tests of reading comprehension--the monitor report provides detailed…

The third in a series concerning some implications of learners' cognitive style for the development of reading competence, this paper reports on a study that was concerned with the effectiveness and efficiency with which ninth grade field dependent and field independent readers processed prose in silent reading at three difficulty levels. Results…

Reflecting the interdisciplinary emphasis that reading comprehension has received during the past decade, the articles in this volume deal with both the processes involved in reading and the instructional practices used in teaching it. The six articles devoted to reading processes deal specifically with the following topics: schemata,…

A study examined the efficacy of using various types of worksheets (representative of those typically used in instruction) that had been specifically designed to elicit differing achievement effects and to promote cognitive processing at the semantic level. Fifth grade students from five classrooms were divided into groups of high, middle, and low…