A study was conducted using standard open-ended cloze testing to establish a criterion for the utility of content reading passages for students in grades four, seven, and ten in the subject areas of language arts and social studies. Passages were selected from books, novels, and textbooks required in these courses. It was found that most of the…

One hundred eleventh and twelfth grade students were grouped according to their knowledge of and interest in baseball and were then tested for their recall of information presented with varying levels and amounts of background information and analogy. The information was presented in the following ways: (1) analogy embedded in text, (2) analogy…

Microethnographic analysis of a videotaped reading lesson given by a Hawaiian teacher to four Hawaiian second grade students was conducted to determine whether elements of cultural congruence could be identified in the patterns of teacher-pupil interaction. Participation structures in the reading lesson were found to resemble those in talk story,…

The effect of adjunct aids on comprehension of expository text by seventh grade poor readers was investigated. The adjunct aids were activities designed to invite readers to make inferences required in order to understand the text, a 1,300-word passage on the Kalahari Desert. Two treatment groups received activities with graphic locational aids,…

The history of three non-Latin based orthographies--Chinese, Japanese, and Korean--is reviewed in this paper. The characteristics of the three orthographies are examined regarding the ease of learning to read with these varied symbol systems. Attention is given to the incidence of reading disability in different orthographies, and research is…

Three research projects were conducted at the University of Maryland's Reading Clinic (for students in grades one through twelve) to evaluate the efficiency of clinical procedures and to generate research hypotheses and techniques. Using data from randomly selected clinical case studies, the research projects focused on two diagnostic procedures:…

The reading responses of 80 second grade students to words in context and words in isolation were analyzed. The children were tested individually with four oral reading selections (kindergarten through third grade levels), a set of comprehension questions, and a word list. The children recognized fewer words in isolation than in context. The…

The 25 articles in this collection focus on reading as a humanizing experience. The topics covered include the following: (1) the politics of literacy; (2) the holographic nature of the reading process; (3) literacy through language communication; (4) life-long reading; (5) diagnosis of reading disabilities based on psychoeducational analysis of…

A representative sample of study skills necessary for using maps, graphs and tables, and references was selected, and criterion-referenced tests assessing those skills were administered to sixth, ninth, and twelfth graders. Because the tests were criterion-referenced, no time limits were set and all students had ample opportunity to complete each…

In an analysis of a processing activities model of memory applied to connected discourse, 206 college students assigned to eight conditions in two studies evidenced significantly greater recall when provided with semantic level tasks than either surface feature analysis or reading control (intentional and incidental) conditions. Additionally,…

To assess the extent to which syntactic and semantic information guides the reading performance of skilled and less-skilled readers in the intermediate grades, a study was conducted involving 96 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students. The students were matched both within and across grade level on nonverbal IQ and within each grade level on age.…

Intended as a source of information on matters related to the evaluation of literacy projects, this guide is designed to help evaluators keep a proper perspective on their work by proposing a wide range of options and suggesting directions for evaluations. The first two chapters of the guide deal with the general principles of evaluation and the…

The Direct Instructional System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR), a highly structured, systematic program, was developed to provide instruction to disadvantaged children. This paper cites the opinions of proponents and opponents of the program and notes the results of previous studies of the effectiveness of DISTAR. The paper then…

An overview of some of the important developments in the psychology and teaching of reading during the past ten years is presented in this booklet. Four developments that are characteristic of the decade are described in an introduction: reading and social conscience, growth in reading research, increase in interdisciplinary advisory committees,…

The 1976 reading achievement scores of year 5 pupils in Queensland (Australia) primary schools were compared with the scores of year 5 pupils in 1971, using Reading Test QR5. The sample included 1,754 students in 111 primary schools. Analysis of the results showed that scores for vocabulary development, comprehension of implied meaning, and…