Individualized reading test materials were developed containing gender-neutral, male-only, or female-only referents in a study to determine whether undue reference to one sex had a differential effect on the test scores of male or female students. One hundred twenty randomly selected third grade students were first tested on the gender-neutral…

The major objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the skill-based Wisconsin Design Word Attack (WDWA) system with severely disabled readers, by comparing a phonetic patterns approach, basal-only approach, and a basal approach combined with the WDWA system. The questions were whether achievement on decoding words in isolation…

This study investigated the success rate and the type of teachers' responses to miscues during a six-month tutoring program. Teachers gave prompts, or cues, to help each child recognize unknown words, concentrating on behaviors hypothesized to encourage pupil success and independence in decoding. Previous research had shown that inservice teachers…

This study investigates the differences between the auditory-visual integration ability of 80 sixth grade students when such variables as socioeconomic status, sex, intelligence, conservation ability, and reading achievement were controlled. Socioeconomic Strata were determined by Hollingshead's Four Factor Index of Social Position. The California…

Thirty-six reading specialists and classroom teachers enrolled in a graduate reading diagnosis course participated in a study to determine whether clinical performance could be improved by alterations in a clinician's memory and strategy. Overall procedures in this study included pretests, 30 hours of clinical training in diagnosis, and posttests.…

Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All…

Word-recognition behavior of 50 high school students two or more grade levels below their age mates in tests of reading comprehension was contrasted with that of 25 controls from the same schools, who were reading at grade level. The experiment included a section in which pictures (flashed, like the words, at 1/100 of a second) were to be…

Approximately 4,000 children took part in a study of the reading attainments of children from different social-class backgrounds in Irish primary schools to find out if the progessive reading gap between children from different home backgrounds that has been observed in other countries could also be found in Irish school children. Tests were…

The relative importance of visual and auditory information in judging student comprehension during a reading lesson was tested by having 42 adult subjects observe videotape recordings of reading lessons with individual children and estimate student comprehension with visual information only, auditory information only, or both visual and auditory…

The Assessment of Language and Reading Maturity (ALARM), a series of 15 subtests that measured reading skills and factors contributing to reading, was administered to 199 urban and 380 suburban junior high school students to assess the concept "progress toward reading maturity." Reading maturity was defined as evidence of solid reading…

One of the newest theories of reading states that readers rely on graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues to get meaning from a text. In the area of syntax, some recent studies not only support its importance but seem to indicate that sentence combining exercises used in writing classes may improve students' syntax sufficiently to help them in…

One method of delineating reading comprehension is T. C. Barrett's taxonomy, which contains the categories of literal comprehension, reorganization, inferential comprehension, and evaluation. In a study devised to test whether the categories of this taxonomy are hierarchical, a reading comprehension test developed by the International Association…

A series of three experiments with suburban elementary students tested the facilitative effect of metaphors on children's ability to understand and remember what they read. In the first study, sixth grade students read two unfamiliar passages and were able to recall metaphoric structures better than literal paraphrases of the same information. In…

In a study of reading clinicians' collection and diagnosis procedures, three types of clinical agreement were examined: group agreement, intraclinician agreement, and interclinician agreement. Eight senior and respected practicing clinicians were involved in the study, which used simulated cases of reading problems based upon real cases. The…

FACTORS PERTAINING TO INFORMAL READING TESTS WERE ANALYZED. SUBJECTS WERE 100 EIGHTH GRADERS IN A JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL. THE MEDIAN NONVERBAL INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORE FOR THE GROUP WAS 116.37. THREE INFORMAL READING TESTS WERE ADMINISTERED -- THE INFORMAL READING INVENTORY, THE EXPERIMENTAL READING INVENTORY, AND THE BOTEL READING INVENTORY. THE…