The Computer Animated Reading Instruction System (CARIS) was developed to introduce reading to children with varied sensory, cognitive, and physical handicaps. CARIS employs an exploratory learning approach which encourages children to experiment with the reading and writing of words and sentences. Brief computer-animated cartoons provide the…

Secondary teachers must help students to expand vocabulary skills, to understand and apply ideas in complex reading material, and to improve organizational and work-study skills. To assess reading instruction at the junior high school level in one school district, classroom observations were made of teachers of mathematics, science, social…

This study examined the influences of the home on children's attitudes toward reading, perceptions of reading, reading habits, and reading achievement. Participating in the study were 38 low-income white children (and their parents) from nine first-grade classrooms involved in the Florida Parent Education Follow Through project. Data were obtained…

The effectiveness of an eight week college course for reading/study skills improvement was evaluated by pretesting and posttesting 152 students with the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and the Optimum Reading Achievement Test and running simple correlations between reading rate, comprehension, vocabulary, and 18 variables that included ACT scores, grade…

The Conceptions of Reading project is examining the role of teacher beliefs and predispositions within the classroom, a complex task that has required modification of both conceptualization and research methodology. This paper discusses the original goals of the project, changes that have resulted from the first year of pilot studies, and proposed…

This research study discusses the reading habits of the 1595 people it surveyed and the relationship of periodical mass media to individual political involvement. Focusing on popular magazines and organizational publications as periodical types, the study indicates that the amount of time available for reading periodicals and an individual's…

A study was designed to determine whether scores for general knowledge, specific knowledge, and general interest on a topic could be used as predictors of children's listening comprehension. Baseball and dolls were chosen as the topics because their stereotypic nature would allow the data to be generalized across the subject population. Data were…

A study was conducted to identify effective instructional strategies being used to teach reading at the secondary school level. In the first phase of the study, researchers observed 43 secondary school remedial reading classrooms to determine the relationships between teaching processes and students' gain in reading. In the second phase, the…

Student cognitive tempo is commonly determined through scores on the Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) test. According to the speed and accuracy of their responses to items on the test, students are classified as either reflective or impulsive. While little is known about the response patterns of reflective and impulsive individuals on specific…

Studies of successful beginning readers have suggested two factors--a responsive communication environment and the awareness of reading as communication--that contribute to early success in reading. In light of this, a study was conducted to identify and differentiate high communication and low communication classrooms and to explore the…

A study examined the use of context clues in identifying unknown words embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). Subjects were 24 eighth grade students who read three passages at the fifth grade level, each with four content words deleted from them and replaced with pseudowords. Context clues for these pseudowords were…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

A study investigated the process of information extraction in reading in order to determine whether language constraints in texts reduced the amount of visual detail noticed by the reader during the reading of specific words. A detailed examination was made of 20 college students' eye movement patterns as they read a group of selected passages.…

A study was conducted to discover what adult literacy students in Northern Ireland felt about a series of booklets that had been developed especially for such students and to find out the students' levels of comprehension of the materials--specifically to determine if comprehension depended on the subject's reading age. Twenty-one male students…

A comparative analysis of the oral reading miscues of 20 average and above-average readers entering sixth grade was made in relation to syntax, semantics, and patterns of comprehension and grammatical relationships. Miscues generated while reading passages in science, social studies, mathematics, and literature were analyzed, and the relationship…