Helping students develop proficiency in the use of interpretive comprehension skills such as are required for reading mathematics and science materials becomes both a means for continuation of technological progress and a dimension of the kind of literacy needed for living and working successfully. The development of these skills must be sought in…

Theoretical frameworks are useful to developmental educators investigating the areas of grammar, critical reading, and the introductory physical science course. Of all available approaches to grammar, sector analysis proves the most powerful as a tool for developmental educators. It is designed to show how a few possible grammatical constructions,…

Research on the effects of questioning in the classroom has explored the placement, timing, type, and social impact of questions. Principles of good questioning include the following: (1) well-stated questions should be concise, clear, and complete; (2) questions should be topical in nature, requiring a complex answer; (3) yes or no questions…

Two studies were conducted to clarify some problems in aptitude treatment interaction research, by concentrating on the macroprocesses in reading required by different instructional methods and the macroprocesses available to students. In the first experiment, three reading groups were used, the first receiving adjunct questions, the second also…

Thirty-six college students read a portion of a contemporary novel presented on a cathode ray tube while their eye movements were being monitored and recorded in an effort to determine how soon after the onset of a fixation during reading the mind begins to deal with characteristics of the language being perceived. The passage contained a total of…

In order to investigate the effect of experimenter-controlled reading speeds on the literal comprehension of multilevel reading passages and to assess the effects of operant-regulated, or self-regulated, conditions on reading speed, these two studies sampled a total of 400 eighth graders. Two passages, originally written at the eighth-grade level,…

Parents and educators have expressed fears that high noise levels in open space schools may interfere with academic achievement. This investigation compared the reading comprehension of 60 fourth grade students in an open space school during periods both of quiet and of naturally occurring background noise. The reading tasks resembled normal…

This report contains three papers discussing skill hierarchy approaches to reading instruction. Jana Mason presents an historical and theoretical review of the notion of a reading skills hierarchy, relates it to three major types of reading programs currently in use, and argues that it is instructionally advantageous to construct a decoding…

This study discusses the importance of comprehension in reading and describes a tool for measuring reading comprehension according to an individual reader's "structures of meaning." The procedure for developing a visual representation of this structure involves three distinct steps. After reading the text, student and teacher employ techniques,…

Fifty-one fifth grade girls and 50 fifth grade boys participated in a study of the effects, on interest and comprehension, of stereotyped and nonstereotyped sex roles in reading materials. Reading materials consisted of eight 450-word stories about a main character who was either a pilot or a ballet dancer. Two plots were written for each…

The vast majority of high school students have passed beyond the reading-acquisition stage and face the problem of reading to get meaning from their textbooks. This paper discusses the need for teachers to help students learn from textbooks in the content areas and outlines a program that could train prospective content teachers to help students…

Two experiments examined proofreading errors to test whether reading is mediated by a phonological recoding stage. In the first experiment, 162 undergraduates circled the misspelled words in a text as the experimenter read the passage aloud. In the second experiment, 165 undergraduates corrected misspellings as they read the same passage silently,…

This study examined the value of the Read-Encode-Annotate-Ponder (REAP) procedure as a teaching/learning strategy, focusing on its use of written annotations designed to achieve specific learning objectives. Subjects were 105 students in six college reading/study skills classes who were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: the…

The use of context clues is basic to the reading act. This paper emphasizes the importance of teaching students to recognize context clues and outlines reasons for teachers' frequent failure to do so. It then suggests ways of helping students become aware of ways context clues can be of value to them as readers and of teaching them to identify…

Greater understanding of reading can come about only after more basic reading research has been accomplished. Basic research should focus on what constitutes good reading, which means that the type of research that will identify characteristics of good reading must be a detailed assessment of variable effects on reading behaviors (not whether…