Argues that student centered pre-reading activities can convince students they know more than they do about their textbooks. (RB)

A study to evaluate seven commonly employed reading comprehension testing techniques in terms of predictive validity, difficulty and discriminability is described. (Author/RM)

Describes remedies to help students read chemistry texts for increased understanding. Some of the suggestions include reading aloud, illustrating, and organizing students into small groups. (BR)

Schema theorists have advanced the understanding of reading comprehension by describing how prior knowledge can enhance a reader's interaction with the text. Accordingly, comprehension occurs when a reader is able to use prior knowledge and experience to interpret a text's message. Educators and researchers have suggested numerous instructional…

A study was conducted to evaluate reading strategies by contrasting regression results of 10 fast versus 10 slow readers. At the word level the lag effect was evaluated. At the text level, the few-argument strategy versus the many-argument strategy and the physical and the syntactic strategies were evaluated. The absolute proportion of the lag…

As in processing oral speech, proficient reading involves "chunking" written texts into meaningful phrase units. Unlike oral speech, however, cues for segmenting the written text at the proper points are not clearly marked in the text. One method for helping readers identify and use phrase boundaries is to mark such boundaries in the…

This study investigated the effects of advance organizers on the English reading comprehension of six bilingual fifth and sixth grade learning disabled students whose primary language was Spanish. An alternating treatment design was implemented. Following each treatment, the students read an expository text written in English and answered eight…

Comprehension instruction must engage students in strategic behaviors over an extended period of time. These extended encounters are necessary to allow students to internalize the strategy and gain sufficient efficiency with the new procedure to justify its continued use. Unfortunately, teacher training programs often reinforce a notion of…

A study investigated the effect of providing students with varying forms of feedback during reading on students' estimates of understanding, actual comprehension scores, and students' use of rereading and reading rate adjustment. The 67 subjects were presented with passages to read, and their reading behavior was monitored via computer. Although…

A study examined the effect of amount of intervening text on the detection of semantic inconsistencies and use of strategic backtracking, by competent and less competent college readers. Data were elicited from 40 undergraduate students (selected on the basis of their high or low scores on a variety of instruments) enrolled in an introductory…

This study investigated the effects of story mapping on reading comprehension. Subjects, 20 second-grade students of below-average reading achievement, were presented over a 10-week period with activities in story mapping utilizing a variety of story map frames. The Metropolitan Achievement Test was administered as a pre- and posttest. Results…

This 90-item annotated bibliography contains material primarily published after 1977. The bibliography provides a readily available resource related to informal reading inventories (IRIs). The three sections of the document are: (1) basic information; (2) research; and (3) descriptive reports. The bibliography is designed to be useful to a diverse…

A study was conducted to assess the possible effects of headings on the search and recall performance of high- and low-knowledge subjects, 153 college students in an introductory psychology course. Seventy-five of the subjects read a 1,760-word adaptation of the passage on organizational processes in memory--the low-knowledge passage. The other 78…

When reading science texts, students often do not know what they know. Prereading activities can help students build bridges from the known to the unknown. Brainstorming will help students recognize their own prior knowledge on the subject and learn from hearing each other's responses. An anticipation guide is a teacher-generated list of questions…