A study was undertaken to identify the strategies good and poor readers at the university level use when reading a text assignment. Forty-four study strategies were identified based on answers to a questionnaire concerning how they studied that was given to one hundred university freshmen enrolled in an elective reading and study skills class.…

The schema theory of comprehension as it relates to understanding while reading is reviewed in this report. Several techniques for the study of on-line measurement of comprehension are described that are based on a series of ten stories, each with two versions. The report notes that when subjects were asked to generate interpretations of stories…

Expository passages containing either main point inconsistencies, detail inconsistencies, or no inconsistencies were presented sentence by sentence to 90 college students. Subjects read through the passages at their own pace and were encouraged to reread sections of text whenever they wished. As expected, subjects spent more time on sentences…

Research into the reading process has shaped an understanding of how readers "make meaning" when they are engaged in a reading activity. This research has highlighted a learning triad--the reader, the text, and the context (or learning environment)--that interactively affects the manner in which the student will comprehend a particular…

A study assessed whether young readers might be induced to use a memory strategy. Subjects were an intact class of 25 fifth grade students taught to use text structure as an organizational strategy, and 29 students in a second class who received no instructional intervention. On three occasions, the 54 students were required to read a test…

Reading research is an important aspect of the Kamehameha Early Education Program. This report describes the overall strategy of the reading research program, which is based on a conceptual framework that divides lines of inquiry into motivation, linguistics, instructional procedures, and correlational analysis. Preliminary results for each of…

Suggesting that the ability to identify words depends as much on contextual information available when one is reading for meaning as on decoding skills, this paper challenges traditional, mechanistic skills approaches to reading instruction. In addition, it contends that comprehending (relating written material to what one already knows) is a…

The responses of 108 children, aged five through nine, to the question, "What is reading?" were analyzed to determine whether there were age-related trends toward more mature and structurally more complex definitions of reading and whether a relationship existed between reading skill and the ability to formulate a definition of reading. The…

Two hypotheses were tested in three experiments concerned with the componential storage of meaning. The complexity hypothesis predicted that a verb with many subpredicates would lead to poor memory strength between the surrounding nouns. The connectivity hypothesis predicted that verbs with many subpredicates would lead to greater memory strength…

In a study that examined the conditions that were likely to facilitate error detection, it was hypothesized that poor readers' comprehension monitoring abilities would improve if they were given assistance in selecting the appropriate schema for understanding a passage. When the hypothesis was tested with 20 sixth grade students in an error…

This report reviews traditional research on studying and supplements it with theory and research from other areas of education and psychology to obtain a clearer picture of the way people study. The state variable of the student's knowledge of the criterion task and the processing variables of encoding and of focusing attention are explored. Some…

One perspective for literary analysis assumes certain divisions of language, grammar, and "worlds of discourse." The worlds that language can express are the phenomenal, extensional, intensional, and alternate systems. Within these contexts, certain linguistic features universally affect responses to the world created and the language used. One…

A group of 50 third garde, 51 sixth grade, and 52 eleventh grade students participated in a study to examine the extent to which good readers at three grade levels expected structures in stories, the nature of their expectations, and developmental similarities and differences in their structural expectations. Materials for the study were prepared…

The relationship between anaphoric nominal substitution and reading comprehension was studied. The Diagnostic Reading Test and the Substitution Test were administered to 80 college juniors, seniors, and graduate students in teacher certification courses, and to 92 college freshmen seeking assistance in improving their reading skills. Positive and…

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that he or she must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodic cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. The success of the method of repeated readings and similar…