In order to provide a comprehensive view of the cumulative effect of the South Carolina Basic Skills Assessment Program (BSAP) on students' learning, a study examined reading and mathematics achievement by all students in the program over a 5-year period (1981-1985), as measured by the testing portion of the BSAP. Subjects were students in grades…

Two basic approaches to teaching children to appreciate literature at any level are the structural (traditional literary analysis) and the reader response approaches. Structural analysis provides the terms and concepts that help readers interpret and discuss literature, while reader response emphasizes the integrated experience an individual has…

Samples of 17 male and 31 female first graders, 26 male and 22 female third graders, 23 male and 25 female fifth graders, 21 male and 27 female ninth graders, and 18 male and 30 female college students predicted their ability to recall sets of items that varied in number of items presented and presence or absence of categorization. The aim was to…

A fundamental assumption in some recently developed language teaching methodologies is that there should be a silent period at the beginning of second language instruction during which students do not speak the target language but develop and demonstrate comprehension in other ways. A number of studies and experiments have attempted to illustrate…

"Inquiry Training," a teaching technique promoted during the 1960s, involves students gathering information about a discrepant event or puzzling situation, and formulating theories to explain the event. Continuing the work of two studies into the efficacy of Inquiry Training (subsequently renamed Cognition Enhancement), a more refined…

The heuristic model and measurement models guiding a proposed seven-year investigation of how children learn to comprehend what they read--and in particular how they comprehend science text--are described in this report. The report first offers a brief description of the heuristic model, which is based upon and extended from studies of effective…

Noting that both comprehension and decoding are used by effective readers and that both processes should be taught, this concept paper focuses on effective strategies for reading instruction. Following an introduction, the first section focuses on the conclusions drawn about word identification by reading researchers. Subsections include…

Noting that the use of captions in television newscasts has grown from simple labeling of newsmakers to more complicated titling of graphics and enumerating important points in a script, a study examined the extent to which captioning assisted viewers in learning from different types of television news stories. Subjects, 100 undergraduate…

These two studies, which were part of a cross-national project exploring the development of Italian and British children's understanding of sociolinguistic rules, investigated politeness in children's requests addressed to adults and children, and children's views on how requests addressed to persons differing in status and familiarity would be…

The use of computers to build diagnostic inferences is presented in two contexts: (1) closed world, exemplified by the space shuttle launch monitoring system; and (2) open world, represented by computerized diagnostic testing of reading comprehension. The analysis shows that the closed world provides a substantially cleaner environment within…

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in schematic aspects of narratives would enhance children's knowledge of story constituents and their interrelationships and to assess the effect of instruction in narrative schema on the reading comprehension of average and below average readers. Subjects were 20 fourth grade students who had been…

The specific aim of the present study is to examine children's metalinguistic awareness of one aspect of pragmatics: the request function. This function was selected for study because it is one of the earliest language functions to appear and because it has been the object of both theoretical and empirical research. Fourteen normal…

Three studies were conducted to investigate the development of the ability of individuals of varying ages to use macrorules for paraphrasing expository text. Macrorules were defined as the general rules of deletion, superordination, selection, and invention that underlie comprehension of prose. In the first study, 18 fifth grade, 16 seventh grade,…

A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day…

There is a great deal of knowledge required to send or receive a message of "no." The acquisition of communicative competence, i.e., the ability to interpret the full meaning of a message and the ability to properly formulate such messages, requires three levels of knowledge. These three levels are all needed in the interpretation of the…