Investigates older adults' reading comprehension skills through syntactic measures and measures of sentence content. Analyzes the apparent reading difficulties of older adults. Provides guidelines for the preparation of prose materials for older readers. (HB)

Presents a case study of three reading-disabled children. Concludes that pronunciation and comprehension skills are two dissociable components of the reading process and follow separate courses of development. Suggests that the question of whether poor readers are also deficient in language comprehension depends on the types of disabled readers…

Reflects on the author's experiences teaching a course on great documents in American history to high school students, concentrating on teaching the Declaration of Independence and the "Federalist Papers." Countering the students' tendencies toward superficial reading and encouraging deep analysis are the teacher's primary goals. (SLD)

Presents a theoretical framework for analyzing educational media, discusses the role of narrative in comprehension, and describes MENO (Multimedia, Education and Narrative Organization), a project investigating how students engage in exploratory learning, and the design of multimedia material for a course on Homer. Argues that narrative structure…

Provides an overview of collaborative strategic reading (CSR) as an approach to enhancing the reading-comprehension skills of students with learning disabilities. Procedures for implementing CSR with collaborative groups and techniques for teaching reading-comprehension skills are provided. The role of the teacher is described and sample teaching…

Grade five students' (n=58) conceptual understanding of plate tectonics was measured by analysis of student-generated summaries and diagrams, and by posttest assessment of both the spatial/static and causal/dynamic aspects of the domain. The diagram group outperformed the summary and text-only groups on the posttest measures. Discusses the effects…

Investigated use of reading skills by intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish to determine whether performance is uniform across learners and across reading texts. Subjects read two authentic unabridged passages in Spanish and were asked to answer questions based on the skills isolated for the study. The skills were locating details that…

Reviews the use of children's trade books in school reading programs with deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The authors urge combining knowledge of instruction with a focus on the role of the reader within response theory and within comprehension research. Specific models and instructional strategies are discussed. A sample list of children's…

This study reports the use of technology in understanding reading and learning abilities (comprehension) of undergraduates in a psychology course. The study's favorable results provide support for further implementations and tests of self-paced computer instruction as a supplement or alternative to more traditionally organized teaching. Contains 4…

Freshman science teachers implemented reciprocal reading as a literacy strategy for reading textbooks. A pretest/posttest study of its effect indicated that writers comprehended more than did nonwriters; paragraph-patterns intervention increased students' ability to identify main ideas; questioning skills influenced content comprehension;…

Examines contributions of vowel signs in reading Hebrew on memory and comprehension. Finds that vowel signs speeded up recognition memory of words in third graders, and improved recall of words printed in the context of mixed lists in sixth graders. Finds also that vowelization improved memory and comprehension of some prose texts. (RS)

Details two experiments examining transfer effects across contextual and linguistic boundaries with poor readers. Concludes that non-fluent readers do not completely integrate surface characteristics (words) and the message of the text. Word-level representations remain free to support transfer across various processing episodes. Maintains that a…

Presents a study that compares the efficacy of the two formulas: Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Listening Comprehension, and Reading Comprehension = Decoding + Listening Comprehension. Presents a second study that explores whether adding another factor, speed of processing, to the "Simple View of Reading" formula improves its ability to…

Twenty-two graduate students in education at a British university read, answered written questions, and then discussed four text extracts from different genres (literary, theoretical, research, and statistical). Results of this study and a follow-up survey of 39 similar students suggested that text genre is a major factor in perceived difficulty…

Investigates the effect of vowels on reading accuracy in Arabic orthography. Finds that vowels had a significant effect on reading accuracy of poor and skilled readers in reading each of four kinds of texts. (NH)