Intended as a chapter in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," this paper provides an overview and interpretation of the work already completed on children's learning, remembering, and understanding with a major concentration on academic cognition. The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the principal trends of the 1970s and…

The secondary level English proficiency (SLEP) test is a group administered 150 item multiple-test of English language proficiency that includes two subscores and eight different item types. It is designed to assess a foreign student's readiness for English medium instruction at the secondary level. This paper reports on two studies which were…

Suggesting that headings provide useful cues for input/output processing, this investigation examined the utility of intact (topic outline format) and embedded (appropriately positioned within text) headings as processing aids with non-narrative text material under conditions of immediate and delayed recall. Passages were selected from biology…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of knowledge schema training and text organization on the comprehension and recall of scientific prose. The first experiment tested whether or not knowledge schema training improves processing and recall of a passage on plate tectonics (32 college subjects served as subjects). The second…

Noting that register and cohesion are two concepts that define a text, this paper describes register as the variety of language that is appropriate for the situation of the speech event and cohesion as the semantic relations in a text that make it coherent. The first part of the paper discusses three cross-cultural studies of comprehension…

Drawn from a symposium presented at the 1979 National Reading Conference, the four papers in this collection describe a notion of conceptual readability, an approach contrasting with traditional readability computations (number of words per sentence and degree of familiarity of individual words) and focusing on the concepts communicated by the…

This monograph was developed to assist teachers in identifying more precise ways to select materials to use in promoting basic skills development. It is meant to be used primarily by teachers of third and fifth grade pupils who must achieve the skills measured in the State Assessment Test required by Florida. Examples are provided of test…

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

This review of the literature on reading theories is built around three components: an explication of each theory, an evaluation of the theory based on an examination of its internal and external coherence and correspondence, and an application of the theory to a child's reading. The literature is organized around discussions of 12 benchmarks…

A study investigated the hypothesis that mental imagery facilitates access to prior knowledge and therefore enhances the ability to infer and make text-relevant predictions. The subjects, 29 first grade and 29 third grade students, were randomly assigned to either an experimental group where they were instructed to make pictures in their head to…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

In order to investigate the relationship between problems in behavioral control and children's capacity to utilize mediational strategies for self control, the responses of a group of disruptive (N=20) and nondisruptive (N=20) kindergarten children were compared in their approach to delay of gratification tasks. Subjects were compared on three…

A study was conducted to explore the reliability and validity of three prominent procedures used in informal reading inventories (IRIs): (1) choosing a 95% word recognition accuracy standard for determining student instructional level, (2) arbitrarily selecting a passage to represent the difficulty level of a basal reader, and (3) employing…

A study was conducted to determine the effect of repeated reading of taped literature on reading achievement of culturally different remedial students in the upper elementary grades. Twenty students were selected using a matched pairs design. The experimental treatment for ten students consisted of reading while listening to the tapes and the…

A study of the cognitive aspects of children's television watching addressed the following questions: To what degree is processing capability mediated by one's attentional set, as opposed to skills that one brings to the viewing situation? If attention is a significant mediating factor, is this true across various kinds of information one can…