This inventory is designed to identify individuals' reading abilities, their attendant strengths and weaknesses, and the difficulty level of materials most appropriate for instruction. The inventory allows the user to measure reading achievement; determine the independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels; and diagnose an individual's…

A study (conducted in suburban central New Jersey using 218 second graders' California Achievement Test (CAT) scores from 1986-1988 compared the effectiveness of two well-known reading programs. Results indicated that although there was no statistically significant difference in the scores, the mean difference suggested that children who were…

A series of studies addressed basic questions about instruction in subject areas such as science and social studies at the elementary level, focusing on group discussion of textbook content and addressing the effects of instruction in terms of students' knowledge acquisition and their independent reading comprehension of new content. Subjects,…

To understand what kinds of mental processing take place during reading and how the child encodes information that is presented, a study investigated the comprehension of a story by asking the reader to take part actively in the decision-making of the protagonist. Subjects, 56 children from a fourth- and sixth-grade class at an elementary school…

A series of experiments investigated infants' perception of inherent structural organization in the prosody of utterances. The experiments used a listening preference procedure to test: perceptions of appropriate pauses in child-directed and adult-directed speech; perceptions of appropriate pauses in speech filtered for most segmental features but…

This annotated bibliography, a project undertaken by graduate students enrolled in a comparative reading course at Northern Illinois University, supplements and updated E. Malmquist's annotated bibliography, "Handbook on Comparative Reading." The bibliography contains 188 annotations drawn from a range of articles, chapters, and texts…

According to Wolfgang Iser's "The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response," the meaning of a literary text is created by each individual reader in response to gaps, or indeterminacies, in the text. With the application of this theory to the two-year college classroom, teachers can show inexperienced readers how to discover the meaning of…

An investigation examined student-generated texts in terms of both traditional and more theoretically valid readability to determine what factors influence comprehension when children read their own, peer, and adult-written texts. Seventy dictated stories created in an earlier study, along with 4 first-grade level stories from the "Reader's…

Intended for administrators and reading teachers, this book deals with the issues about reading that seem to be the most common causes of concern. The topics discussed are the following: a general approach to the teaching of reading, ways to involve parents with reading, a prereading program, the organization of a reading program, the process of…

Speech communication theorists have defined certain rhetorical characteristics that may improve the use and production of written texts. In order to determine whether social studies textbooks have rhetorical characteristics--containing both content information and the author's attitudes toward it--and whether these characteristics have the desired…

A study was conducted to explore the process of learning from television news and the relationship between audio and visual channels. The subjects, 82 undergraduate journalism majors enrolled in five newswriting classes, were randomly assigned to experimental conditions. Newscasts were recorded from evening newscasts aired by networks, and scripts…

A study examined the effect of the prereading activity called story impressions on reading comprehension and oral reading miscues of students. Story impressions give clues concerning characters and events in an as yet unread story and ask the students to write a story to make the story fragment comprehensible. Subjects, 60 second grade students…

A study examined the relative merits of characteristics of general modeling when applied to cognitive modeling of reading comprehension processes and whether the characteristics of modeling, when applied to cognitive modeling of reading processes, influence comprehension and comprehension monitoring. Subjects, 100 eighth grade students who could…

This book describes specific ways for teachers to assist their students in mastering skills needed for success in school. It is based upon the belief that thinking can be improved, human intellect sharpened, and academic ability increased. A case for study skills is made in Chapter I. Chapter II provides guidelines for the immediate improvement of…

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…