A training program was devised to develop automaticity of one subcomponent of reading--locating and disembedding multiletter units within words. The system involved the use of a training task that was implemented in a microcomputer-based game that required students to detect whether a target unit was presented within words that were shown in rapid…

Designed to assist the observer in the understanding of the Group Reading Interaction Pattern Observation Instrument (GRIP) training manual, this programmed review contains a series of coding activities provided for the purpose of determining if each observer can differentiate between the categories and subcategories of the instrument as well as…

A study was conducted to provide preliminary information on the nature of remedial reading instruction. Specifically, the study examined the focus of remedial instruction and the relationships of this instruction to the classroom reading program. In addition, it gathered data on what instructional activities remedial students missed when they left…

A study was conducted to determine whether students who mapped prior and post knowledge of a basal reading lesson would achieve higher scores on a comprehension test and write better summaries of those stories than would students who received traditional basal reading instruction. Subjects, 30 fifth grade students, participated in either a…

Two experiments examined the cognitive resources used by readers in sentence modeling (summarizing the propositions in a sentence) as a function of reader task and of sentence complexity. It was predicted that encoding a sentence into memory for later recall would require more cognitive resources than reading a text to answer immediate questions,…

Recent studies of reading and writing instruction suggest that literacy instruction is easily distorted, incorporating measures of achievement that do not reflect students' mastery of the process of understanding, reading materials that are ill-structured and divorced from any real communicative intent, and exercises in subskill learning that…

Papers presented at a roundtable session on research on reading at the 1985 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) conference provide an international and historical perspective on reading. They include: (1) "Research on Reading in Czechoslovakia" (H. Kolarova-Palkova, Czechoslovakia), a historical account of the development of…

The cross-cultural approach to reading, which involves a structured, individualized sequence of learning activities, was designed to accommodate the culture and language of black "nonmainstream" students. The approach includes two teaching/learning strategies: associative bridging, the process of beginning with students' familiar dialect and then…

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between reading achievement and a set of social and individual variables through the use of a critical path analysis. Data, taken from Cycle II of the National Health Examination Survey, included statistics on a national sample of 7,119 children, ages six through eleven years. Four…

Data collected in 1976 and 1977 point to significant differences in reading and related language skills achievements between male and female students in Wisconsin in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. There are four theoretical explanations of this "achievement gap": interest in subject matter, sex role expectations, the earlier maturation of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relationship between the syntactical complexity of expository writing and reading comprehension levels of community college students, (2) fluent and…

A study was conducted to acquire information about poor black children who were successful readers in order to determine what can be done to increase the number of such children. For purposes of the study, "successful" was defined as scoring at or above grade level on a standardized reading test at the end of fifth grade, while…

A study investigated the effects of a teacher inservice program on teaching fourth grade students the functional relationship between questions and the response information to which they refer. Ten teachers and 180 of their students participated in the study. Three of the teachers participated in a traditional half-day teacher workshop on…

A study examined the ways that basal readers portrayed the family. It was expected that the readers would give only token representation of both parents working or of one-parent or mixed marriage families, and that very few portrayals of reading or of reading materials would be found. Eight basal readers from 6 publishing companies for grades 1…

A study was conducted to determine the feasibility of using oral story making experiences to improve the oral language proficiencies and "sense of story" of fourth grade remedial reading students through select literary experiences. These experiences included exposing the students to literature in read-aloud exercises, and using wordless…