Noting that the United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) has been involved in research on reading assessment in the Army from both practical and theoretical perspectives, this paper addresses practical Army problems in reading assessment from a theory base that reflects the most recent and most sound…

Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

To determine the educationally related characteristics and relationships among selected variables that describe the United States Navy's recruit population, data were obtained on 84,123 recruits who entered the Navy between June 1981 and May 1982. Data were obtained from the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension Test and the Armed Forces…

A study tested a theory of inferencing strategies. Subjects were 40 sixth grade students of average intelligence from a large Western Canadian city who were divided according to reading proficiency and background knowledge. Six passages, three familiar to the students and three unfamiliar to them, were written by the researcher in such a manner…

Two studies using the same texts and procedures but different experimental designs (1) evaluated an instrument designed to identify children who overrely on their prior knowledge in the interpretation of written text, and (2) investigated how degree of congruency of information interacts with degree of explicitness and level of staging to affect…

The relationship was explored between the ability to understand nonverbal metaphoric similarity and the ability to produce verbal metaphors to talk about that similarity. Subjects, 45 college students, were shown filmed scenes that depicted both metaphoric and literal similarity. Half of the scenes were of stationary objects and half of moving…

To ensure that the essential job-related reading materials for nonrated United States Navy personnel were not beyond their reading capabilities, a study was undertaken to determine the readability levels of a representative sample of essential Navy job-related materials. The criteria for selecting material were that it be narrative text and that…

This paper on the nature of instruction as it has been informed by instructional research is organized into two major sections. The background section describes the origin and evolution of the research that has been conducted into teacher response toward reading miscues, while the second section relates this research to other classroom research…

An overview of significant research studies, bibliographies, historical reviews, definitions, and commentaries on speed reading during the past 60 years is presented in this paper. The first part of the paper considers the concept and definitions of speed reading, and summarizes research from the l940s and 1950s--including discussion of eye…

To test how phonemic awareness influences reading, two experiments were conducted in the northwestern part of England in which twenty pairs of children possessing phonemic awareness (pa+) and lacking phonemic awareness (pa-) and matched for reading and chronological age were compared. In the first experiment, the subjects' ability to detect…

Discusses four methods of teaching reading to beginning readers and suggests where research can provide improvements in reading instruction. (RB)

Explores the ability to decode phrases and clauses, using children at three developmental levels to determine the effects of syntactic structure on the eye-voice span. (RB)

Presents and discusses findings from exploratory research on the effect of grouping and pace on reading acquisition. (RB)

Presents information regarding item construction and validation procedures for a content-referenced test intended to measure functional literacy. (RB)

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of matching modality aptitudes to classroom-based reading instruction. (RB)