Drawing on a previous project carried out in Sweden, the "Prevention of Reading Difficulties" project was implemented in the Netherlands between 1978 and 1985. The project encompassed three stages: (1) a longitudinal investigation to establish the possiblity of predicting reading achievement before formal reading instruction starts; (2)…

In order to test the efficacy of having college students read texts in which phrase boundaries are explicitly cued, the phrased text treatments were administered to 42 college students from 3 developmental reading courses in one southeastern university. An experimental group was given the phrased texts, while a control group was given the…

Designed to appeal to students who want a short but up-to-date overview, researchers who are interested in a critical appraisal, and consumers who would like to know what leaders in the field think, this collection of articles highlights the changes that have occurred in readability research from the past to the present and makes predictions about…

A study investigated whether the use of reading games would result in greater improvement in the reading skills scores of a sample of fourth grade students as compared to a control sample taught by a traditional basal method of instruction. The subjects, 20 heterogeneously grouped students (10 for the experimental group and 10 for the control…

Underlying virtually all of the basal reading series available in the United States today is the assumption that learning to read is a skill-by-skill and word-by-word process. This part-to-whole approach to teaching reading is based on principles of behavioral psychology and "scientific management" developed a half century ago and treats…

A study investigated the use of the semantic webbing technique to improve reading comprehension. The model of a web consists of the core question, the web strands, the supports of the strand, and the strand ties. Subjects, 25 third graders and 26 fourth graders, were assigned to reading ability groups based on past performance, informal testing…

In light of criticisms that teacher preparation programs do not adequately prepare prospective reading teachers and specialists for actual classroom problems, a study was conducted to determine the accuracy of teacher diagnoses and planning for reading difficulties and to examine differences in coursework preparation and classroom experience.…

The vocational reading demands of the plumbing trade were investigated to compare the curricular reading demands encountered by apprentices in the educational setting and the occupational reading demands encountered by journeymen in the actual job situation. A secondary purpose of the study was to examine the role and treatment of reading, as both…

A study assessed the reliability and some aspects related to the validity of an open sentence approach to assessing comprehension during silent reading. Subjects, 37 randomly selected seventh-grade students, read an "Opin" passage, prepared by deleting the second half of every other sentence. The blanks filled in by students were…

A study examined whether illustrations that must be attended to in order to make sense of a text hinder decoding by encouraging dependence on such illustrations for interpretation of text, both for decoding and for answering questions. Subjects--167 first graders--were asked to read four stories, two of which were taken from basal readers and two…

Focusing on the classification decisions that affect a student's opportunity to learn to read, this document outlines a study analyzing the classification practices in two urban elementary schools in Illinois. Chapter one defines the issue of student classification and its impact on how students are taught to read, examines implications for…

A study examined the differential effects of previewing textual information with questions containing higher-order versus lower-order information. The 104 college students in the study read three passages, each of which was preceded by different combinations of questions about information high or low in the structural hierarchy of the text, then…

A study was conducted to determine the benefits of an approach to teaching inferential skills that combined an explicit attempt to sensitize children to why and how one should draw inferences to prior knowledge with substantial practice in drawing such inferences during story discussions. Subjects were 20 good and 20 poor fourth grade readers who…

Two hundred ninety-nine stories from the 1974 and 1981 Houghton-Mifflin primary- and intermediate-level basal readers were analyzed to determine if there had been any changes in the ways males and females were portrayed. The data indicated that sex role stereotypes still exist in children's literature. Though there was an improvement in the number…

Reading educators stress the importance of teaching reading study skills in college content area classes. Thus, a freshman level reading education course offered the opportunity simultaneously to model effective practices for preservice teachers and to conduct a study of the gains in both content knowledge and reading study skills for students who…