The role of information-processing task analysis in linking psychological theory to instructional practice is illustrated with reference to reading. Two detailed information-processing models of decoding skills are compared to show how psychological considerations suggest the superiority of one model over the other as a basis for instruction.…

The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of ninth-grade slow readers with ninth-grade good readers and with sixth grade readers on a test of syntactic comprehension. The significant difference between the ninth-grade good readers' and the ninth-grade slow readers' performance on A Test of Sentence Meaning (ATSM), developed by…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between attitudes toward reading and the reading skills of a population of adults who are good readers. Two hundred adults enrolled in eight reading classes were involved in this study. Initially a reading test and a form of the Semantic Differential were administered to all subjects.…

The identification of the specific components of literary taste in this study was accomplished through a search of the writings about children's literature and taste, the advice of a panel of experts in the field of children's literature, and the assistance of teachers and librarians. A list of 41 components was then developed into a Literary…

The questioning techniques which teachers use when leading a class discussion of a reading assignment can be an essential component of profitable instruction. A brief review of the past 50 years of research on questioning levels indicates a need for attention to the cognitive level of queries as well as to their sequence since investigators have…

The comprehension of the Minimum Distance Principle was examined in three experiments, using the "tell/promise" sentence construction. Experiment one compared the listening and reading comprehension of singly presented sentences, e.g. "John tells Bill to bake the cake" and "John promises Bill to bake the cake." The…

The material in this monograph is based on the idea that science content and the reading and reasoning processes for learning may be taught simultaneously in the science classroom. Topics of the six chapters are: distinguishing between content and process, developmental and functional reading; diagnosis in teaching science; preparatory activities…

The problem of this conference panel was to develop a research and development agenda to improve the reading and writing proficiencies of high school graduates. This panel report consists of four approaches to the problem: studies of the problems of ill-prepared high school students; surveys of the reading and writing tests used by colleges and…

This study extended concepts derived from Rothkopf's mathemagenic hypothesis to problem solving. While previous mathemagenic research has established that adjunct questions interspersed with written prose facilitates learning, it has been criticized as educationally nonsignificant because the research has focused on verbatim learning. To test…

Recent research supports the view that the beginning reader's comprehension is aided by a similarity between written materials and the child's own oral language production. The content of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Kindergarten Storybooks was analyzed by surface linguistic form class and compared to an analysis of 5.5- to…

Evaluating a reader's ability to use language to derive meaning should be one of the major emphases of reading instruction. A technique which is used in miscue research to evaluate a reader's comprehension of written material is called the retelling. The reader's retelling of a story or passage provides information about his or her ability to…

To determine if Rasch Model procedures have any utility for equating pre-existing tests, data from the equating phase of the Anchor Test Study (ATS) were reanalyzed. This management report summarizes the work completed in the project, describes the differences in this project and that of the ATS, and presents recommendations and conclusions to the…

This paper critically reviews selected studies in the area of reading comprehension, in order to characterize the differential patterns that skilled and unskilled comprehenders employ. The research reviewed is organized into three broad components: (1) decoding, (2) accessing the meaning of single printed words, and (3) text organization…

This research examines the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. A process model for the comprehension of stories is proposed which assumes that stories are encoded in a hierarchical organizational framework which represents the abstract structural relationships of the plot. The implications of…

The major purposes of this study were to determine the effect of a specific cognitive organizer, the Structured Overview (SO), on reading comprehension and to assess the effect of accompanying the overview with a set of directions for its use. One hundred twenty-four undergraduate members of a developmental reading course were randomly assigned to…