Two studies examined how the factors of content-relevant knowledge and text organization influence students' abilities to study and to remember text information. The first experiment examined the effect of prior content knowledge on students' ability to identify important information in the text. Forty 7th- and forty 11th-grade students, experts…

To determine what effect the elimination of all literal questioning would have on students' literal comprehension abilities as well as inferential abilities, a five-month study was conducted with four groups of third and fourth grade students (n=33) who were reading on grade level in their school's adopted basal series. Two different third and…

Building on previous ethnographic research on middle school students' reading and writing activities, a study examined the continuity and change in students' use of, control of, and access to reading and writing resources from kindergarten through grade 8 in an elementary school, a middle school, and the community. Reading and writing resources…

Twenty-four beginning readers participated in a study of the effectiveness of cued learning. The study was carried out in two phases--a letter-learning phase and a word-learning phase. The children were taught one at a time by the same teacher over a four-year period. During the word-learning phase, one fourth of the children used a vowels-only…

Three conclusions were drawn about within-class grouping after reviewing the work of several researchers on the following topics: teacher and student behavior, academic achievement, perceptions about reading groups, social class membership and reading group assignment, and the role of group cohesiveness. The conclusions were that: (1) although the…

Three studies examined the impact of different instructional reading materials and subsequent analysis of comprehension by retellings. The first study investigated the influence of the presentation of the material. Subjects, 83 freshmen enrolled in a biology course, were shown one of four combinations of course material involving a slide…

This position statement recommends changes for secondary school reading programs and suggests that reading instruction be taught throughout all years of schooling if students are to become successfully functioning citizens. The paper (1) explores the changing concept of reading; (2) addresses the integration of the language processes; (3)…

A study investigated whether a student's repertoire of comprehension-fostering tactics could be reliably identified, with the expectation that this sort of diagnostic profile might serve as a basis for an individualized remedial program. Subjects, 81 second, third, fourth, and fifth grade students enrolled in remedial reading programs in six…

A study examined the effect of parental involvement in the reading achievement of fourth grade students. Subjects, 12 students of above- and below-average reading levels from an inner-city school, were given a variety of surveys and letters to be taken home to their parents. Parents were encouraged to participate actively and were offered specific…

A study of discourse synthesis (readers/writers composing new texts by selecting, organizing, and connecting content from source texts) examined the performance of accomplished and less accomplished readers in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades on a report-writing task. Over a 3-day period 60 English/language arts students wrote informational reports…

A study examined the importance of two phonological encoding procedures (addressed phonology and assembled phonology) in children who are learning to read and how the relative importance of these two procedures might change over the age range from six to eight. Subjects, 72 fifth, fourth, and third grade students from two inner London (England)…

Since 1969 when it was mandated by Congress, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about the performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in many subject areas, but most frequently in reading. Designed to reflect current developments in reading theory and research, this booklet describes the objectives…

A study examined oral and silent reading rates at various levels of difficulty to establish criterion rates for fluent reading at the fourth grade level. Subjects, 27 male and 45 female students from 6 classes in 3 public schools in central Oklahoma who read at an average of more than one year above grade placement, had their oral and silent…

This paper presents an informal account of two studies concerned with the significant positive effect which students reading to a parent or other adult has on the students' reading performance. The paper describes the first study, conducted between 1975/76 and 1978/79 in London, in which over 2000 multiracial, working class children took books…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…