A study investigated the influence of key factors (general comprehension ability, prior knowledge of passage topic, interest in passage topic, and locus of control) on training at-risk college students in the use of graphic organizers as a cognitive learning strategy. Subjects, 60 college freshmen required to take a developmental reading/study…

A practicum was conducted to determine the effectiveness of parental reinforcement at home of the reading skills taught at school. Parents of first grade Chapter 1 students, participated for a 10-week period with the first week devoted to training parents to use the materials and the paired-reading concept. Scores on the reading assessment test…

This report explains why reading story books to young children (an activity assumed to help in the acquisition of literacy, although there is no unambiguous evidence in support of this assumption) is likely to be important and reviews the evidence about the role it might play in literacy development. The first section of the report examines…

Focusing on the problems of validity and representativeness of samples, a study examined the history of literacy in the United States since 1880 in order to set the contemporary debate on test scores, literacy and reading performance in the longer-range perspective of the last 100 years. The quality of the data and the arguments of literacy…

A study reanalyzed data from two previous studies to investigate (1) validity of imagery ratings and reports as measures of reader response to a story, and (2) similarity of final regression models for recall and imagery reports. Imagery and affect ratings of story paragraphs were found to predict both imagery reports and recall of a second,…

A study examined the effects of instruction in meaningful units on the comprehension and fluency of poor readers in the fourth grade. Subjects were five fourth-grade students in a northeast Georgia school classified as poor readers. Method of instruction included modeling smooth reading with appropriate junctures and good intonation. The…

A study examined whether cultural relevancy was achieved in the development of stories for the "Doctor Bird Readers" by the Jamaican government for children in grades four through six by using Jamaican authors and artists. Quantitative questionnaires were used to survey the schools, and participant observations and informal interviews…

A study examined how both children and adults process inferences when reading prose. Subjects, 24 third-, fifth-, and eighth-graders, and adults, read stories where a consequence was implied, and then answered questions. The stories differed in the degree to which the inference was necessary for comprehension, and the readers engaged in either…

A study was conducted to write an ethnographic description of how the influences of the reader's culture and the culture depicted in a text are associated with the responses of first-semester college freshmen to a series of contemporary Appalachian short stories. Cultural backgrounds of six informants and the cultures depicted in six stories were…

Using extensive data gathered from a follow-up study on an early reading program which tested the reading competence of high school seniors who had received formal beginning reading instruction in kindergarten, an ancillary study investigated the effects of early formal reading instruction on bilingual students. Three of the dependent variables…

Three basal reading series, levels kindergarten through grade three, were studied to categorize the types of literature each contained. The following series were analyzed: "The Headway Program" (Open Court Publishing Company), "Series r Macmillan Reading," and "Basics in Reading" (Scott, Foresman and Company). It was…

The Compensatory Language Experiences and Reading-Reading Recovery Program (CLEAR-RR) provided early intervention to 224 underachieving first grade pupils in Columbus, Ohio schools. The program's two major goals were to develop and provide CLEAR-RR for the first grade pupils and to adapt and apply the inservice program for teachers. Specially…

A study explored whether instruction involving an emphasis on study skills could help seventh grade students retain material encountered in science classes. Subjects were 32 students from two intact science classes in a predominately white, middle class school in New Jersey. The experimental group received an advance organizer as an overall…

Eighty-two undergraduate and graduate students at a major southwestern university participated in a study integrating reading research utilizing tachistoscopes with current knowledge based on analysis of reading connected texts. A tachistoscope was used to examine the nature of visual perception in relation to the ability of the subjects to apply…

A variety of reading process models have been proposed and evaluated in reading research. Traditional approaches to model evaluation specify the workings of a system in a simplified fashion to enable organized, systematic study of the system's components. Following are several statistical methods of model evaluation: (1) empirical research on…