To determine why some children find textbooks to be much more difficult to understand than teachers' presentations, four reading selections for middle grade readers were analyzed, as were tape recorded lessons prepared by ten teachers on the basis of the same selections. Excerpts from one of the written passages and excerpts and analysis of one…

To discover whether the typical college reading course repairs students' phonic disabilities to a significant degree and whether students who are severely phonically disabled benefit from the treatment provided in such courses, a study was undertaken involving students in 14 classes. Instruction for those students in the developmental reading…

Students in 61 English classes at an urban high school participated in an investigation of the effects of sustained silent reading (SSR) on their reading comprehension skills and on their atttiudes toward reading. SSR calls for a systematic structured time in school for students to read books of their choosing without being tested when the reading…

Defining early reading as reading that occurs prior to the time that a child begins formal schooling, this annotated bibliography contains references on the topic from a variety of sources that include journals, books, conference proceedings, ERIC documents, dissertations, and theses and that represent the research in a number of countries. The…

Empiricists may be defined as naive fumblers, people who collect and analyze data in the absence of a guiding theory. A theory may be defined as an empirically verifiable explanation of phenomena that predicts behavior. Empirical research may be defined as scholarship that is public and is performed using entities measured in units that can be…

To determine if there was variability in scheduled and engaged time in reading among classrooms and in management style among teachers and to see if these factors accounted for differences on a standardized reading achievement measure, a study was conducted involving 13 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade reading classrooms. Pretest and posttest data…

Historically less emphasis has been put on the importance of attitude factors than on the skills of reading. When defining attitudes as a person's views, interests, expectations, and so on, attitude toward reading is a combination of all components that contribute to a person's underlying disposition to reading including expectations, interest,…

To determine whether increasing decoding speed affects the comprehension of poor readers, two experiments were designed to test two groups consisting of seven good readers and eleven poor readers chosen from fourth and fifth grade. In the first experiment, poor readers were trained to read a list of words as rapidly as the good readers and were…

A two-phase investigation of characteristics associated with student achievement in elementary and secondary reading centers in the Houston (Texas) Independent School District is described and evaluated in this paper. After presenting background information about the centers, the paper describes the first phase of the investigation, which revealed…

A cloze informal reading inventory (CIRI) was constructed from a basal reading series and administered to all 120 second through sixth grade students at a university laboratory school to determine if CIRI was as effective as a traditional informal reading inventory (IRI). All students scoring below second and above eighth grade on the IRI were…

A three-phase study was conducted in Alberta, Canada, to determine factors influencing reading achievement and specifically to assess the effects of television viewing on reading achievement. In the first phase, 453 people responded to a survey regarding which factors they felt were important in influencing reading achievement. It was concluded…

This monograph is the third in a series of semiannual reports of research related to reading in secondary schools. The first section of the monograph is made up of three research studies on the validation of teaching procedures to facilitate students' comprehension of content area texts, the graph-reading abilities of seventh grade students, and a…

A study was conducted in South Auckland, New Zealand, to discover how parents could help children with reading difficulties. Specifically, the study addressed three questions: Do parents want to help improve their children's reading? Can parents learn specific reading tutoring skills? Does parent tutoring improve children's reading, both at home…

The Reading Improvement Through Art (RITA) program, an interdisciplinary approach to remedial reading that combines reading and visual arts activities, was evaluated in nine New York City high schools. A total of 240 students participating in the program were pre and posttested during the fall 1975 and spring 1976 semesters. The results of this…

The development of children's metalinguistic understanding of the basic unit of reading--the word--was examined. Subjects were 45 children from preschool, kindergarten, and first grade who were reclassified according to reading ability (nonreadiness, readiness, reader). The children's understanding of the word as a linguistic segment was measured…