The Study Technique Questionnaire was administered to 914 students in grades 6-8, in grades 10-12, and in undergraduate school. The students were asked to describe, in detail, their preferred study technique for a fairly long reading assignment. The responses were reliably grouped into one of nine categories: read only; read and underline; read…

Responses from 528 reading teachers to two scales, one indicating the extent to which they perceived a problem as occurring frequently in their classrooms and the other indicating the extent to which they perceived a problem as bothersome, were factor analyzed. Eleven "frequency" and ten "bothersome" factors emerged from the analysis. Among the…

The central feature of language is symbolic meaning, and the act of reading is a part of the symbolic process that characterizes human life. Meaning occurs as a result of interpretation in a context, not as a result of response or reaction. Signs have a literal meaning in a specific context, while symbols have a figurative meaning in an implicit…

This paper proposes that phonics and meaning instruction in beginning reading programs can be designed to be mutually supportive. The first section outlines attempts to modify a commercially available reading program in order to provide useful phonics instruction strategies. Students showed strong gains on achievement tests after implementation of…

This report describes the rationale and procedures for a series of studies related to reading tasks and reading texts. Children's reading tasks are examined in five strands of investigation: ability to read for meaning, ability to read for doing, ability to read for remembering, comprehension difficulties in skilled readers, and classroom…

Standardized reading tests exert a great influence on curriculum materials, teaching methods, and student perceptions of the nature of reading; these tests must reflect the best recent research findings. Passage dependency research has attempted to increase the accuracy of reading tests, and has focused on the following four areas: (1) reading…

It is difficult to account for the real and easily measured differences in verbal competence. Differential psychologists investigate basic traits from which observed behavior is thought to be generated, but if thinking is viewed as a problem in information handling, research will more profitably focus on the relationship between behavior in…

The three papers in this book treat the experimental literature on eye movements in reading and information processing to determine what factors might be manipulated to improve reading efficiency. The first paper discusses control models of eye activity in reading, research data concerning eye activity with reading material, and future directions…

This study examined the ability of junior high school students to use advance information when making semantic category decisions. The subjects, eight good readers and eight poor readers, identified paired words as "same" or "different" in category, with some words more highly associated with the category than others--in the "fruit" category, for…

In discussing instructional approaches to reading, this book offers several definitions of reading and discusses teaching techniques, including early methods, the basal approach, and recent trends, among them the phonics approach, the linguistics approach, the language experience approach, the initial teaching alphabet, individualized reading,…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a meaning-emphasis or a code-emphasis method of teaching beginning reading to first-grade children was most efficacious. The following procedures were employed: establishment of a workable definition of the reading process, development of an experimental design in which the control of natural…

One purpose of the International Reading Association (IRA)--to improve the quality of reading instruction at all levels--was discussed. The topic was divided into three parts: Developmental Reading, The International Challenge, and The Role of IRA. The substance of the first part was based on the theoretical model of reading described by Gray in…

In order to determine if significant relationships exist among intersensory transfer ability, intersensory perceptual shifting ability, modal preference, and reading achievement, a study was conducted using 90 randomly selected Oconee County, Georgia, third graders whose mean IQ was 98 and whose mean reading comprehension was grade 3.…

A series of lessons designed to explain what the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) is and to prepare prospective teachers of i.t.a. materials and methods as thoroughly as possible is presented. The eight lessons of the course, for each of which a separate booklet is provided, include the following: (1) The difficulties of traditional orthography…

The incidental learning effects of discrimination which would be required in searching for and selecting related information in a text were explored. Sixty-one students from three educational psychology classes at Fairleigh-Dickinson University participated. Subjects were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and were given reading search…