Reading as thinking, the key to reading maturity, flexibility, and efficiency, is dependent upon the reader's purposes and his repertory of reading skills. Instruction should begin with the teacher's evaluation of the reader's functioning skill level, his psychological characteristics, and the nature and quality of his stored information. Skillful…

The scope, rationale, staff, and instructional methods of the University of California at Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) reading program are described. U.C.L.A. students come mainly from the upper level of high-school graduates and in college may have very demanding work loads. Consequently, the reading and study center has based its policies on student…

The rationale and techniques for developing skimming and scanning skills with college students are discussed, and it is noted that perfecting these skills involves changing some basic attitudes towards reading such as the ideas that one needs to read every word and that increasing speed decreases comprehension. Lengthy passages in regular college…

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…

Eighty-four freshmen nursing students at the University of Kentucky were randomly assigned to two experimental and two control groups. The experimental groups participated in a developmental reading program over a 10-week period, while the control groups were only allowed access to the library and encouraged to use the time for studying. Different…

The effects of telegraphic prose upon the comprehension of written and auditorily presented messages were tested. Two separate experiments were conducted. Subjects for the first experiment were 60 undergraduates enrolled in a remedial reading program; subjects for experiment 2 were 100 undergraduates enrolled in an introductory educational…

Investigates the relationship between learning style, reading and study skills scores on a number of standardized tests, and performance on a scanning experiment involving locating information in meaningful prose. (HOD)

Teaching skimming techniques in a college compensatory reading course helped students gain in both speed and comprehension skills. (MKM)

Research methodology on reading improvement should focus on the processing of stimuli and experience of content rather than on simple models of reading using eye movement, silent speech, perceptual span, reading ability and visual ability as explanatory concepts. (MKM)

Reviews 11 studies originally analyzed by Bergquist to support the contention that children can be trained to increase their reading rates without any loss of comprehension along with more recent work. Concludes that rapid reading results in a decrease in the accuracy of comprehension. (FL)

Five elementary level males with learning disabilities read material at two levels of difficulty in a multi-element design. Findings suggested that oral reading rate and reading comprehension performance are more strongly linked than previously suggested. (CL)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Finds no support for a widely-held theory relating redundancy to reading rate and eye movements. (Author/RB)

The purpose of this report is to examine aspects of oral reading performance--accuracy, rate, and fluency--that cannot be observed from results of the main NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reading assessment. The results provided here are intended to inform educators and researchers about these three aspects of fourth-graders'…

Due in part to health care improvements and the post World War Two Baby Boom, (Siegel, 1972), the population of older adults is growing and will continue to grow. By 2030 approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population will be over age 65 (Verma, 1989). By attending to readability (the ease of reading a printed page) and legibility (the speed with…