This paper describes the Basic Reading Inventory, an individually administered informal reading test composed of a series of word lists and graded paragraphs which the child reads aloud to the teacher. Comprehension questions follow the reading of each paragraph. The contents include: "Preface"; "Description of the Basic Reading…

The effects of imagery instructions, word arousal value, and retention interval on children's literal and inferential comprehension of text was studied using 459 grade 3, 4 and 5 students. Imagery instructions significantly facilitated inferential comprehension on the short-term retention test but this effect disappeared a week later. On the other…

Designed to measure the syntactic maturity of oral speech, the K-Ratio Index was devised for use in an investigation of the relationships between certain measures of syntactic maturity of oral languages and silent reading comprehension scores. Preparation for computing the ratio was accomplished by transcribing oral speech samples, excluding…

Designed to assess the reading comprehension ability of high school students, this measure contains items which were constructed to test the subskills found by R. T. Lennon, on the basis of factor analysis of thirty studies of comprehension tests, to be the four components of comprehension tests that may be measured reliably. These subskills are a…

The Nelson-Denny reading test was administered to thirty Navy first class diver candidates to evaluate the group's vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading rate and over-all reading ability. Reading rate and comprehension were at the twelfth grade level, while vocabulary ability was equal to the college freshman norm. (Author)

To comprehend effectively, students must be taught how to analyze the particular comprehsnsion tasks before them in order to determine the specific thinking processes necessary for the solution of these tasks at the appropriate level of difficulty. Rather than teaching specific comprehension skills in an abstract, formulistic manner separated from…

The purpose of this study was to investigate effects on comprehension of content material in the three subject areas of science, social studies, and literature. Sixty-nine eighth grade students from the same school served as subjects. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Survey E, Form 1M, Comprehension subtest, was used to group students into above…

The purpose of this investigation was to discover the relative effectiveness of the SQ3R method, a mechanized approach, or a combination method for teaching reading rate, comprehension, vocabulary, and total reading performance to remedial college freshmen. There were four experimental groups with sixteen subjects in each group and a control group…

This experiment attempted to provide some insight into the effect of three newspaper design complexity variables on the readership and comprehension of news stories and on judgments of the interestingness and pleasingness of the page designs using the three complexity variables: (1) horizontal and vertical headline pattern; (2) horizontal and…

This study evaluated the effect of the cloze procedure in the development of comprehension, vocabulary, and speed of reading by comparing the scores on the Cooperative English Tests; Reading Comprehension of a group receiving cloze reading comprehension exercises, a group receiving conventional reading comprehension exercises, and a group…

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted…

Knowing how to read is a very important aid in accelerating mental activity and curiosity in children and thus opening up new regions of thought and experience--one of the broad goals of education. However, reading should not be defined solely in relation to print media. Other languages, such as film, can enrich the study of all humanities…

Because of a lack of systematic structuring, much of the research pertaining to the variables influencing the reader's use of context as an aid to determining the meaning of textual units is limited in its applicability. Some of the major variables that have been found to influence the reader's use of context are constraints of textual segment,…

To determine whether the inductive or deductive teaching method is better able to help college freshman remedial English students make progress in formal grammar and mechanics, in vocabulary and reading comprehension, and in composition, two classes of 23 students were formed into a test sample. One class was instructed for a semester by a…

The effects of specific directions on the reading comprehension of sixth-grade students were investigated. Two passages on different topics, each with 20 percent of the sentences relevant to the topic, were materials for two informal tests administered to 92 six-grade students. Half of the students were given specific directions to learn about the…