A study was conducted to examine the comprehension process of ten proficient fourth grade readers as they read a story within a particular instructional environment. The instructional environment was designed to provide for background experiences, purpose for reading, and purposeful feedback. Results indicated that the subjects constructed a great…

Four experiments involving 54 adults were performed to examine the relationship between the effects of story grammar categories and content centrality on subjects' importance ratings, summaries, immediate recall, and delayed recall. Results of the studies indicated that central content units were judged as more important and were better recalled…

Conventional wisdom holds that many children experience difficulty when they first read expository material after spending most of their reading time with simple narratives. Unfortunately, there is little available data bearing on this belief, nor is it clear how one would go about testing the claim. The labels "narrative" and…

When 77 college students were asked a certain type of question after every four pages of a 48-page oceanography text that they were reading, it was found that the text information relevant to questions was learned better than text information irrelevant to questions. Furthermore, reading times and probe reaction times on a secondary task were…

This monograph examines reading as a cognitive process, focusing on the relationship between reading and thinking as developed in Piagetian theory. Sections of the paper provide a brief overview of Piagetian theory, pointing out its relevance for reading; examine correlational, comparative, and perceptual studies of the relationship between…

The purpose of this book is to contribute to an understanding of the nature of reading so that teachers can decide how to teach children in a way that will enable children to make sense of what they read. The process of reading, the perceptual and language skills involved in reading, the nature of memory and comprehension, and the way that…

This paper is intended as an introduction to the concept of comprehension monitoring, which is an important component of reading and involves evaluating and regulating one's ongoing comprehension processes. A discussion of research that investigated comprehension monitoring with both children and adults is presented and the implications for…

The purpose of this study was to explore the similarities and differences in the reading behaviors of highly creative (HC) and highly intelligent (HI) secondary students. An intensive analysis of the oral introspective and retrospective responses of 36 subjects to two written passages was made. An experimental classification framework was…

Senior scientists representing a variety of research-oriented disciplines examine the reading process. Among the topics discussed are visual perception, the processing of written information, models for reading and speech, the relationship of spelling to sound, and areas of needed research. Also discussed are the influences of grammatical…

Summers' annotated bibliographies of secondary reading (1963, 1964), "Review of Educational Research,""Journal of Reading," ERIC/CRIER, and "Research in Education" are listed as resources for all phases of reading. A shifting of trends in the nature and scope of research topics in secondary reading is noted, with diagnosis and treatment,…

This survey of literature summarizes the findings of current research on sex differences in reading: studies relating to the validity of the sex-difference claim, studies examining the relationship between maturation factors and environmental characteristics, research concerned with factors in the home and school, and studies concerned with the…

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. In experiment one, the target sentences followed either short or long contexts which induced either literal interpretations or metaphorical ones. Results indicated that only in the short context…

This report summarizes studies of perceptual, decoding, and lexical stages of processing in reading. Using a letter identification task, it was found that subjects who were low in overall reading ability scan a visual image more slowly than do high ability readers and are slower in identifying letters when they do not occur in a familiar sequence.…

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

A framework for viewing human text comprehension, memory, and recall is presented that assumes patterns of abstract conceptual relations are used to guide processing. These patterns consist of clusters of knowledge that encode prototypical co-occurrences of situations and events in narrative texts. The patterns are assumed to be a part of a…