High school juniors and seniors participated in three studies of the effects of a thematic organizer on passage comprehension. Comprehension was measured using a cloze procedure in the first study and using a passage-reproduction task in the second and third studies. A thematic organizer (material presented to provide a context for the passage)…

Results from two experiments with college students indicate that better readers evaluate information in a paragraph with respect to its relevance to the paragraph topic, processing topical information at the expense of nontopical concepts. (AA)

Contends that students need training in the reading of information prose in order to be prepared to attain career goals. (MH)

According to Barlett (1932) remembering prose is a constructive process. Meaningful material is stored in memory in schematic form and recall is achieved by a process of reconstruction. Bartlett observed that recall becomes distorted with the passage of time. This research deals with constructive remembering over time in terms that are compatible…

Attempts to reframe current controversies over several aspects of language, including meaning, comprehension, acquisition, reading, and reasoning. Argues that in all these cases the conflicts are rooted in differing assumptions about the relation of meaning to language: whether meaning is extrinsic to language--designated as "utterance"--or…

Discusses a study to determine whether the facilitative transfer of knowledge from one prose passage to a second prose passage would occur over a time interval. (JM)

Students were required to locate atrocious prose examples in their textbooks and rewrite the passages. (HOD)

Describes a method used to show students the difference between poetry and prose. Points out that such a method, although effective and enjoyable, fails to meet government standards for oral assessment work. (ARH)

In two experiments, the importance of mnemonic illustrations for improving the learning and memory performance of learning disabled adolescents was studied. Results showed that students learned more when they studied passages with mnemonic pictures and that mnemonic instruction facilitated students ability to make inferences about information…

Grammar is the public aspect of language, the rules that make for "correctness." It comprises the linguistic rules that must be mastered if the general interest is to be served. As such, the rules of grammar have to be clear-cut in their application and definable in objective terms. (MLW)

Describes clientele who could benefit from software being developed at University of Iowa for writing effective prose; what these authoring tools do and how they work; and design standards likely to produce a successful product. The software's design scheme, general design principles and objectives, and educational potential are discussed. (MBR)

The degree to which concreteness of prose material presented in an auditory fashion would interact with learners' lateral preference under different right hemispheric presentation conditions was investigated with 96 adults. Subjects recalled a greater number of ideas when the passage was concrete. Abstractness interacted with cerebral dominance.…

The relationship between students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and their conceptions of prose coherence was examined. Sequencing and unity were categorized as mature conceptions. Students with context-oriented beliefs about the nature of knowledge were more likely to report mature coherence conceptions than students with fact-oriented…

High school students read and were immediately tested on a prose passage, then estimated how well they would score if tested after a delay of 1, 8, or 15 days. Students expected a larger amount of forgetting than actually occurred and failed to predict positive effects of note-taking. (PN)

Seven experiments were performed to address three issues: prose decisions of different levels of difficulty, directed attention effect, and the effects of decisions on memorability of prose among relatively good and relatively poor readers. (Author/PN)