This study was designed to confirm the hypothesis that objectives which focused on items of information best facilitated reading retention among a population of elementary school children while controlling for the children's reading level rather than for the "density" of the reading passage. Two 550-word reading passages taken from "Life in the…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether practice in transformational sentence combining will aid students' reading comprehension by giving them a large repetoire of syntactic constructions from which to draw when matching constructions contained in the materials they are expected to read. The first section of the document discusses the…

It was hypothesized in this study that those students exhibiting concrete operational intelligence, which can be measured by a standardized test of conservation, would perform adequately on a test of reading comprehension. One-hundred six first-grade students from a consolidated school system in North Central Pennsylvania were tested with a…

The purpose of this study was to determine differences in word recognition strategies used by good and poor readers. Twenty good readers and twenty poor readers were randomly selected from a fourth grade class and randomly assigned to levels of a five by five repeated-measures Latin Square design. All of the subjects were given two tasks to…

Instructional television is said not to have achieved its potential in primary grades because of five major problems, all related to lack of precise information about the communicative effectiveness of instructional presentations in appropriate time frames. The five problems cited and discussed are lack of adequate knowledge of primary children's…

An instructional system designed to implement the objectives of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Reading Program is currently under development. This document defines the program objectives, content, content sequence, and pedagogical strategies for each outcome area. A description of the program's instructional activities, their sequence,…

A detailed description of the syntax in the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Kindergarten stories is presented to aid in the formulation of comprehension assessment and instruction. The lexicon and surface structures of the sentences appearing in the stories were classified and tabled in terms of types of elements and functions. The new…

One of the programs included in "Effective Reading Programs...," this program serves more than 1,800 children in grades 1-8. Begun in 1972, this program is designed to provide a strong foundation in reading. The teachers in the district defined by behavioral objectives those reading skills essential to decode and comprehend unfamiliar…

Early psycholinguistic investigations were based on linguistic theory (primarily Chomsky's transformational theory) as a model of competence. Recent studies have suggested that naive language users neither make the same linguistic judgments as the theorizing linguists nor productively follow the linguistic rules, and that nonlinguistic knowledge…

The major purpose of this paper is to initiate discussion on the validity of systematic phonemics in the area of language acquisition. This is not an attempt to write a phonology, but rather an outline of some theoretical and formal devices that may be used for gaining insight into the phonological system of the child. An evaluation procedure…

This study explored whether student generated questions aid learning and, more specifically, whether the effective conditions of learning in this learner controlled situation resemble those which occur when questions are instructor imposed. Sixty-four high school students were paid to serve as subjects in this experiment. These students engaged in…

This study attempts to determine whether stated behavioral objectives, learner activities, and self-pacing increase both learner input into instructional decision making and comprehension as well as improve attitude. The subjects for the study were drawn from three sections of a principles of communication course which were all taught by the same…

Ninety educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents listened to recorded material with and without oral advance organizers in an evaluation of the effectiveness of instructional techniques derived from subsumption learning theory on their learning and retention of meaningful information. Ss were randomly assigned to either an experimental group,…

Good and poor sixth grade readers served as subjects. Experiment 1 tested for immediate spatial order memory of letters by giving children four or six consonants and having them place the letters in the order in which they had appeared in a just-viewed stimulus. The consonants composing the strings were either positionally redundant (R) or…

Assessed were the effects of verbal placeholding and full verbal rehearsal (verbalizing aloud the critical components and sequence) on the direction following behavior of 14 institutionalized retarded adolescents (mean IQ 48). A control group from the same institution participated in practice sessions without the verbal rehearsal stress. Pre- and…