This study attempted to increase the reading efficiency of normal readers by developing a method of producing telegraphic prose. The subjects' (undergraduate students in psychology) rank ordered the words in each sentence of a prose passage according to the importance of the words for communicating the main sentence idea. Specific treatment…

This study obtained, under controlled conditions, a criterial measure of academic achievement that was typical of ordinary school learning tasks in order to determine the relationships between individual differences and the learning and retention of prose text. The criterion chosen was a multiple choice test on an ordinary written passage studied…

This book is an anthology of unedited verse and prose written by 14- and 15-year-old students. The book is intended for teachers in training, for their tutors, and for all teachers of English. The verses are classified as undirected and directed poems about nature, places, war, the Egyptian Tomb, up and back again, and people. The prose is…

This study investigated subjects' ability to combine and organize information from different sentences, as well as their ability to retain that information. Ninety-six college undergraduates were given three trials to learn the characteristics of ships from a text. Attributes of each ship were clustered together (name organization), or sentences…

In an experiment designed to explore the interaction of individual differences with question pacing in learning from written materials, 93 college students were administered aptitude tests representing verbal and memory abilities and then randomly assigned to treatments in which questions were placed after every one or four pages or were omitted…

A simple, new method for determing the readability level of prose passages in reading material for children is described and discussed. The method, which assigns a value to each noun in selected passages on the basis of its frequency level on standard word-frequency charts, correlated highly in a number of studies with independent estimates of the…

This instrument for describing writing is designed for use by teachers and researchers at the secondary and college levels. The two main sections are an outline of the complete instrument and the instrument itself. Various categories of the instrument can be used to describe general, descriptive, and explanatory prose; other categories are related…

Describes the separation of modern professional writers from the real world and their misplaced concern with presenting an image of toughness instead of truly communicating. (DD)

College subjects were given either no prepassage, a thematic prepassage, or a topic sentence prepassage followed by an ambiguous passage in either superordinate or coordinate context. The thematic prepassage facilitated performance on a rigorously scored free-recall measure and a multiple-choice measure. Superordinate contextual organization…

Twenty subjects at each of four age levels (8, 10, 12, and 18) rated linguistic units of prose passages in terms of their importance. Third- and fifth-grade subjects did not differentiate items in terms of their relative importance to the text and at all ages such judgments were related to recall. (Author/JMB)

Tests, with five groups, the production of facilitative transfer effects with the use of five abstract passages. It was predicted, based on assumptions about knowledge structures that three of the groups would recall more from the second passage than would the latter two groups. The results confirmed this prediction. (Author/DEP)

Recalls from five passages learned by undergraduates in the course of growing up in America were obtained. Recalls, while partial, were exact with no evidence of constructive memory. Results fit a simple model of associative chaining retrieval of passively stored surface structure units. (CHK)

Explored connection between everyday activities of different aged adults (N=54) and their performance on prose recall task. Regression analyses showed that demographic variables of age, education, and verbal ability were best predictors of prose recall. Total time spent reading and other reading variables were also significantly correlated with…

In this study on the interactive effects of advance organizers and reasoning skills, 112 undergraduates read a literature text preceded by either a comparative advance organizer or a placebo introduction. Results suggest that instructional organizers produce neither serious loss nor substantial benefits for many purposes of communication. (BS)