A study investigated the effects of teaching 24 middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. Performance on reading comprehension tests following reciprocal tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Students…

Examines the cognitively high-level text processing, or macro-processing, of expository passages. Investigates reading comprehension during the sixth and ninth school years. Finds that girls outperformed boys regardless of the comprehension measure and also finds that performance on both measures, but particularly on hierarchy-rating, correlated…

Focuses on the issue of the optimal on-line glossing format. Two glossing methods are compared. The first provides readers with sentence-level translation equivalents of the second language words. The second method connects the words with their meanings through basic dictionary forms. Examined which of the two methods is most beneficial for text…

Researchers agree that a core linguistic deficit underlies poor reading at all ages; poor readers generally exhibit weaknesses in phonological processing and word-recognition speed and accuracy. Reading intervention grounded in research imparts to older readers the skills missed in primary grades and can bring them to grade level in 1 or 2 years.…

This study, with 48 students (including 16 eighth graders with learning disabilities (LD), 16 age level peers, and 16 reading level peers), found that all groups, but especially LD students, benefited from experimenter activation of prior knowledge on reading comprehension tasks testing inferential reading ability. Experimenter activation of prior…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

Describes how the author worked with her colleagues and with her sixth and seventh grade students, together searching for ways to improve their ability to read textbooks effectively, and to process and build on text information independently. Notes the open dialogue engaged in by teacher and students throughout the entire process as they searched…

Presents an essay that is the result of group-centered activities by graduate students and a faculty mentor in a leadership training program for prospective educational administrators in California. Notes that the class produced some forward-moving and future-thinking core recommendations for reading improvement and achievement in multicultural…

Eight classrooms of third graders (n=111) and their teachers were provided with two intervention strategies, partner reading intervention designed to enhance fluency, or collaborative strategic reading, designed to enhance comprehension. Over time, there were statistically significant effects for rate of reading for both interventions for low- to…

Analyzed the 1994 Grade 4 Maryland National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) regarding the effects on reading achievement and engagement of: students' amount of engaged reading, parental education, gender, balanced reading instruction, and reading opportunities. Amount of engaged reading predicted reading achievement after controlling for…

Finds that comprehension strategy use and Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP) reading scores were significantly correlated with each other and with grade point average (GPA). The strategies that discriminated between students in terms of GPA performance and TASP reading scores were related to several distinct facets of reading comprehension.…

An instructional program focused on story theme was administered to 2nd and 3rd graders in a high-poverty school. Compared with traditional instruction, the program improved theme comprehension and identification of instructed themes in new stories. However, the program did not help students apply a theme to real-life situations or identify and…

Investigated effects of inferential questioning, and of the timing of such questioning, on narrative comprehension by 4th, 7th, and 10th grade students and college students. Results indicate that as reading and language skills become more proficient and automatic, inferential questioning increasingly directs readers' attention during reading to…

Presents three reading-comprehension strategies for elementary teachers to use during read-alouds. The first involves reading and using critical-thinking skills. The second uses character mapping to make predictions about a story. The third involves story mapping to encourage independent reading. The strategies encourage students to support one…

Assesses effectiveness of intervention exercises in the use of textbook comprehension strategies on middle school teacher endorsement of instructional adaptations. Finds trained teachers would use significantly more strategies. (NH)