A year-long interdisciplinary project sought to develop professors' available repertoire of strategies for guiding students' independent learning from texts and developing students' ability to learn from texts with adjunct guide materials in a minicourse setting. Adjunct materials included such instructor devised aids as study questions, graphic…

The reading improvement program developed at Westminster College (Fulton, Missouri) was designed with a whole language base, one that considered reading, writing, speaking, and listening as inseparable components of language. Specifically, it was designed to meet the needs of 27 freshman students who were determined to be academically capable but…

Prose-learning strategies are classified in this paper as prose-dependent (those that authors can use to optimize communication) or processor-dependent (those that learners can use to optimize reception) and are cross-classified as stage-setting (those that prepare the learner for upcoming prose information) or storage-retrieval oriented (those…

A community college reading/study skills course was designed to progressively introduce the student to the logical elements involved in symbolic processing and to facilitate understanding of the nature of the processes, as well as of impediments to them and of methods that will facilitate maximum efficiency in dealing with written material. The…

A reading curriculum for adult learners is described, offering guidelines for instruction at three levels of reading equivalency (nonreader to third grade, third through sixth grade, and sixth through ninth grade). The curriculum is designed to help adults develop skills in reading, writing, mathematics, and studying in the content areas. After…

Since the mastery of any subject matter depends on learning its key concepts--its language--content area teachers should use innovative vocabulary development exercises to help their students master the language of the subject area. Teachers should try to coordinate vocabulary study with other learning tasks instead of depending on dull,…

The reaction times (RTs) of 48 elementary school students in two word identification tasks were recorded to gauge the effects of orthographic and phonic structures. The subjects, high ability and low ability students from grades four and five and from grades two and three, either matched a word to one of two pictures on display or decided if a…

A study was conducted with 12 college-aged inefficient readers in a reading improvement and study skills course. Students were divided into types by the instructor, and the type of student who would do best with one of three types of independent projects was considered as a major question of the study. The student types were (1) gregarious and…

A study was conducted to examine (1) the type of instruction most likely to help both normal and learning disabled readers use the analogy strategy in reading novel words, and (2) how fifth grade disabled readers compared with normal second and fifth grade readers. Analogy strategies, the most abstract of the reading strategies, are generally…

When two adults read eleven paragraphs, assigned a meaning to the target word in each paragrah, and answered questions about their strategies for dealing with the difficult/unknown words, they exhibited four strategies, outside of actual definition, that skilled readers use to deal with such words. The most often used strategy is paragraph…

The Intellectual Framework Analysis (IFA) is a structured approach to reading expository prose. Suitable for use with high school students and college freshmen, the IFA consists of a number of questions concerning the author's subject matter, classifications, value judgments, motivation, and form/content. The IFA incorporates a number of study…

A study was conducted to determine how a representative sample of Iowa elementary school teachers viewed a number of research-supported and nonsupported teaching procedures in spelling. In addition, the study was designed to ascertain the degree to which this representative sample of teachers was utilizing or not utilizing selected…

This paper describes the development of a reading and study skills course for law students at Brigham Young University. A study technique called the "FAIR Method" helps students look for the following common elements in all law cases: the facts on which resolution of the dispute turns, the action or classification of the dispute (such as assault…

The purpose of this study was to investigate two types of transfer of learning (application transfer and gains in aptitude) in a mastery learning instructional mode. Seventh grade students were assigned either to a learning for mastery instructional mode or to a control group in a conventional classroom. Although the content matter covered and…

One in a series of four guides developed for use by parents of children enrolled in a Title I reading improvement program, this booklet provides learning activities and suggestions for improving the reading abilities and skills of junior high/middle school children. The areas covered are homework, reading comprehension, word study skills, word…