Examines three categories of psychological processes which determine how easily a table can be used: comprehension processes, search processes, and interpretive and comparative processes. The breadth of cognitive processes involved in the reading of tabulated information provides the basis for drawing similarities with the problems of…

Methods developed by Rothkopf; McConkie, Rayner and Wilson; McGaw and Grotelueschen; DiVesta and Rickards to assess prose processes produced by adjunct postquestions are reviewed. The processes are: specific backward; general backward; specific forward; and general forward. (MH)

The effects of four objective treatments (none, before text, after text, and combined before and after text) and two types of experience (practical and experimental) were investigated for intentional and incidental learning. (Author/RC)

The process of learning to write, particularly in a foreign language, is long and complex. There is a truth in the saying that the best method of learning to write is to read, and especially, to write. (Author)

Discusses how narrators (distinct from authors) emerged in English prose works during the last decade of the sixteenth century. Reports that instances of the use of narrators can be found throughout the seventeenth century, but that it was another hundred years before the technique developed fully enough to constitute a recognizable narrative…

Maintains that journalism skills courses must also impart to students a sense of the splendid power of language and the artisanship of molding clear ideas with words. Points out that it is up to the teacher of news writing to remind future journalists of their rich language heritage. (SR)

Reports a study of students' ability to write argumentative prose. Examines the knowledge students used to judge the quality of seven constructed arguments. Concludes that while older students were more effective in writing arguments, all students' judgments about arguments were similar to adults'. (SR)

Third graders produced narrative or descriptive passages in response to prompt words. Results supported the domain-specific view of production, in which content elaboration occurs across repeated productions when there is a connection between the earlier and the later production and that connection is based on semantic similarity. (ME)

Discusses publishing on the Internet by young authors. Describes "fan-fiction" Web sites where fans write passages that link to characters in popular books, television shows, or movies; fan-fiction inspired by the Disney film "Newsies"; posting short stories on Web pages; poetry, book reviews, and other publications; the attraction of the Internet…

In 1993, under contract from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Educational Testing Service assessed the literacy proficiencies of a nationally representative sample of all adults, aged 16 and over, from nearly 27,000 homes. That assessment, the National Adult Literacy Survey, produced a profile of the English literacy skills of the…

The notion that student generated questions or instructor generated questions of a recalled prose passage will better aid learning is examined. (DEP)

Two experiments examined children's ability to apply three different standards for evaluating their understanding. Five-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children were presented with short narrative passages within which were embedded three types of problems (nonsense words, internal inconsistencies, and prior knowledge violations), each of…

Interest in mathemagenics (adjunct aids used in text to enhance learning) has most likely resulted from the indirect effects of inserted postquestions, whereby the learning of unquestioned material is enhanced as well as that of questioned material. However, since most mathemagenics research has occurred in laboratory settings in which subjects…

Drawing from the conclusions of research studies by linguists and psychologists, this paper describes four classes of principles for constructing readable prose for both print materials and computer screens: (1) global principles dealing with a schema-theory approach to discourse type, with topical focus, and with parallelism; (2) sentence-level…

A total of 150 undergraduate students randomly assigned to five experimental groups studied ten paragraphs with questions interspersed at different locations in the text. Performance on incidental items was significantly lower (p < .05) in the question before (QB) than in the question after (QA), question before and after (QBA), and the…