Trade and Industrial Reading Strategies is one of five instructional guides in the Reading Strategies in Vocational Education Series. Developed to assist teachers working with students considered disadvantaged because of reading deficiency, the guide contains several strategies, suitable for adaptation, specifically related to trade and industrial…

The importance of visuals to communication is nothing new. Visuals attract more attention, convey more information more quickly, and are more memorable and possibly even more believable than text. What is new in communication is the extensive use of visuals in on-line publications. While visuals take a long time to materialize on the computer…

This booklet of information and accompanying reading selections are intended to help a tutor get started with a new adult learner. The booklet does not provide suggestions for teaching strategies, but rather discusses conducting the initial assessment of learners, observing the student reading, categorizing the students into one of three stages,…

This digest describes some of the problems researchers face in communicating educational research data to general, nonresearcher audiences. Accessibility is one problem. Most research on effective educational practices does not filter down to the people who contribute or control funding. Another problem is that of readability. In the rare event…

A study examined teachers' opinions as to what makes children's magazines good as well as which magazines they are currently using in their classrooms and in what ways magazines are being used. Subjects, 10 (of 19) experienced third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers at P.S. 106 in the Bronx, New York City, responded to a questionnaire concerning…

Theory indicates that a fourth, the emergent, reading level may be even more important in understanding the process of reading development than the three previously designated levels: the independent level, at which students have no difficulty reading on their own; the instructional level, at which students need assistance; and the frustration…

A study investigated how comprehension, as measured by the accuracy and speed of performance, is affected by the information contained in a set of procedural instructions. Using instructions that were varied with respect to the mode of presentation (pictures, text, or pictures and text) and the degree of explicitness of operational information, 68…

Two methods for aiding social studies students in developing better reading skills are suggested. The cloze and maze techniques are completion tests requiring the reader to insert words through multiple choice or from the surrounding context of the sentence. (JR)

Findings stress the importance of the teacher's role in influencing learning in the community college. (RB)

A syntactic density instrument was devised to determine how children use specific syntactic structures in their oral and written language. (JH)

This report is a guide for the maintainer or developer of the computerized comprehensibility system (CCS), a system that uses techniques and results from artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology to critique the comprehensibility of a technical document. The purpose of this report is to allow the qualified programmer to rapidly understand…

This study asked participants to rate models of computer-generated text on the perceived ease with which it could be read and studied. These ratings were submitted to a Q-mode factor analysis to identify the underlying criteria used when the reader/perceiver formed a judgment related to the "study-ability" of the text model. Subjects…

A study examined the general structure of children's information books and their use of language. A corpus of over 110 information books was examined for (1) obligatory elements of the genre, (2) optional elements, (3) iterative or repeating elements, (4) elements with fixed orders of occurrence in relation to other elements, and (5) elements with…