Intended to encourage parents to help their children acquire early reading skills at home, this paper provides a rationale and recommendations for early reading instruction. Following an introduction, the sections of the paper discuss (1) the historical background of beginning reading, (2) the benefits of early reading, (3) early reading case…

Sixty-six grade six students were subjects in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching children the reading comprehension skill of main idea identification. Both experimental groups (strategy and basal) and the control group received eight lessons of 30 minutes each. All instruction occurred over a…

A study compared the effectiveness of four instructional procedures designed to teach four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. The four procedures were (1) reciprocal teaching/corrective feedback, which requires that initially the teacher do a considerable amount of instruction about and modeling of the four…

A study explored how cognitive mapping assists college students in gathering information from long prose passages and organizing this information for subsequent writing. Mapping is a prewriting technique in which students develop a cognitive scheme or graphic representation of a text, which reduces memory load and facilitates integration and…

To establish collaboration between theory and practice, between teaching and learning, and between researchers and teachers, a three-year project was initiated at Metcalf Laboratory School. Teachers were invited to explore reading comprehension and composition in their classrooms in a manner that supported unique teacher decision making and…

To test three specific hypotheses about recall as a function of four categories of logical relations, a study was done to determine whether logical relations systems of prose analysis can be used to predict recall. Two descriptive passages of naturally occurring expository prose were used. Each text was parsed into 45 statements, consisting of…

A study investigated developmental changes in children's fluency in interpreting metaphors. Specifically, it examined the development of an implicit interpretation strategy found in adults of mapping relational structure from base to target. Ten subjects from each of three age groups--five to six years, nine to ten years, and college-age…

A study compared the academic achievement, classroom behavior, and emotional stability of 21 elementary school students from single-parent families to that of 21 students from intact, nuclear families. Behavior checklists were used to ascertain classroom behavior, and academic achievement was assessed through analysis of test scores on the…

A study was conducted to provide a replication of the gaze duration algorithm proposed by M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter using a different kind of passage, to compare the three gaze duration algorithms that have been proposed by other researchers, and to measure processing time in reading. Fifty-one college students read a passage while their eye…

The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2)…

To show the difficulty of eliminating test bias and to develop a methodology for distinguishing between the effects of prior knowledge and of skill development on reading comprehension, 207 eighth grade students from rural and urban areas were administered an 18-question reading comprehension test. Quantitative and qualitative effects of prior…

To learn how basal reading program manuals affect teacher behavior during the time scheduled for reading, classroom observations were made of 16 teachers from first, third, and fifth grade classes. The first grade teachers were observed for a total of 605 minutes; the third grade teachers for 780 minutes; and the fifth grade teachers for 535…

To determine if different graded word lists can be used interchangeably for assessment purposes, and to determine if age, grade, or sex affects performance on the different graded word lists, a study examined the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT), Levels I and II, the San Diego Quick Assessment, and the Graded Word Reading Test by F.J. Schonell.…

A specific skill necessary to expand vocabulary is that of acquiring additional meanings for words that have common, already known meanings. A study was conducted to determine if presenting subjects with the known meaning of a word before requiring them to learn a new meaning for it would result in a learning detriment. The study used homonyms…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 26 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the comprehension monitoring abilities of tenth graders; (2) elementary school pupils' abilities to perform closure at various case grammar positions at their…