A study was conducted to determine whether primary school children who were taught reading with an experimental modality prescriptive-diagnostic reading program achieved higher reading comprehension scores in the intermediate grades than did children who were taught reading with a traditional reading approach. The experimental group was composed…

It is proposed in this report that theories about reading processes and about the structure of what is read can be readily formulated in schema theory terms. Previous work on the structure of texts is first reviewed and problems with earlier formalisms and scoring methods are discussed. Analyses are then presented of the structure of three types…

To assess the success of third grade readers in segmenting written text into the ideational groupings judged appropriate by adult readers, 22 students were given two prose selections and told to mark each location where a good reader might pause or take a breath while reading a story out loud. Their pausal locations were then compared to those…

To assess whether gains in vocabulary and comprehension would result from the use of the cloze procedure as a teaching technique, 222 students in 12 fourth-grade classrooms were randomly assigned to one of four groups: a control group and groups that were taught with cloze deletion patterns involving deletion of every tenth word, deletion of…

Experimental investigations of children's prose comprehension with special emphasis on the development of skills necessary for reading comprehension are examined in this paper. The research is discussed under four major headings which correspond to specific comprehension skills: identifying main ideas, understanding logical structure, making…

In a project designed to interpret research and development in the field of reading to practitioners, telephone interviews were conducted with a representative group of the nation's educators and with seven outstanding reading researchers by the Research and Development Interpretation Service. The practitioners were found to be interested…

The procedures used in developing test forms P and Q of the "Wisconsin Tests of Reading Skill Development: Comprehension" are described in this report. The criterion-referenced tests assess the 40 skills and objectives of the "Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development: Comprehension" commercial edition. The report contains…

In an attempt to find a new approach to making research applicable to the classroom, this book is organized around questions about reading instruction posed by a group of 14 teachers, supervisors, and administrators. The book contains 24 questions presented in the form of actual classroom situations. In order to clarify the question, each of these…

An experiment, which replicates an earlier study conducted in Sweden, was performed to study the effects of prior knowledge of relevant subject matter on reading comprehension and on memory. Fifty college students read one of two contrasting passages that presented two opposing points of view after they had recorded their beliefs about the subject…

The focus article in this newsletter contains a discussion of the theory of reading as a thinking process and offers practical suggestions for implementing instruction in teaching reading as a thinking process. The section on theory is based on observations of the reading process as perceived by psycholinguists such as Frank Smith and Kenneth…

This report examines how the making of inferences plays a role in the comprehension of narratives. The report poses and discusses seven questions: What are inferences? What functions do they perform? What is required to make inferences? What processes are involved? What kinds of inferences are there? How can readers' inferences be assessed? Can…

Reading tests can be a source of inquiry into the processes of reading, learning to read, and curricular implications. During a staff development program, teachers reviewed and analyzed various reading tests. They discovered that reading tests seem to be unequal in their concern for what is being measured; that very few tests offer explicit or…

The ten reading research studies published since 1955 and deemed by the author "most important" in terms of quality, originality, and applicability to elementary reading instruction are described in this report. Discussed are studies on reading approaches by Russell Stauffer and by Neville Bennett; a study on reading readiness by Audrey…

A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

This is the teacher's guide to the third and last unit in a series designed to provide the Spanish-speaking child with a complete language arts and reading program for grades 1-3. The unit focuses on the development of decoding, encoding, comprehension, and interpretation skills. This teacher's guide for the third grade workbook contains a series…