Informal assessment, the use of teacher designed instruments that are based on materials actually used in the content area classroom, is used to determine the student's potential for success with particular materials and the areas of potential difficulty in these materials. Informal assessment also helps to determine the need for supportive…

The concept that a child's potential reading level can be measured via listening comprehension has at least one major shortcoming: it is of doubtful worth for children in grades one through three. First, reading comprehension and listening comprehension are not approximately equal early in a child's schooling. In fact, it seems that they generally…

The easiest way for a content area teacher to find how effectively students can read materials assigned in class is to design a teacher-made inventory, using the materials to be read and studied by the students, called a Textbook Usage Inventory. Reading skills and resources that should be incorporated in the inventory include literal skills,…

The analysis of story recall, a device used widely in reading research to gauge comprehension, typically involves a process of mapping recall against the original story. The process is based on the assumption that subjects are aiming for verbatim recall. To test the validity of this assumption, an analysis was conducted of 20 narrative retellings,…

In light of conflicting and limited results in the assessment of the effects of text-forming structures, a study investigated the effects of specific microlevel and macrolevel text-forming elements on readers' comprehension of selected passages of scientific technical prose. More specifically, the study examined the individual and combined effects…

The SQ3R method has been the backbone of textbook reading strategies for over 20 years. However, research indicates that students--even though they know how to use the technique--do not apply it because they believe it is too involved and too time consuming. Theoretically, SQ3R is a sound technique based on current knowledge about brain functions,…

Merging the instructional implications drawn from theory and research in the interactive reading model, schemata, and metacognition with computer based instruction seems a natural approach for actively involving students' participation in reading and learning from text. Computer based graphic organizers guide students' preview or review of lengthy…

A study investigated the reading comprehension of 34 college freshmen in relation to the presence of 20 syntactic elements of written language in their expository writing. Language samples included one silent reading comprehension test that identified "high" and "low" readers and two expository in-class themes, one developed…

Two experiments were conducted to determine the features of text to which skilled adult readers need to attend while reading and the features that either are of minimal importance or can be processed automatically without directed processing. In the first experiment, 12 college students attended to a timed picture naming task, in which a picture…

The effects of making ratings of idea importance, saliency, or textual imagery on story recall was investigated with 180 students (second and sixth grade normal students and mildly mentally retarded adolescents). Ss in eighteen groups attempted to recall a story presented auditorially and in print either before rating on a textual variable…

The intent of this curriculum is to prepare kindergarten through sixth grade students to become skillful readers by exposing them to increasingly complex activities with print and, at the same time, to develop appreciation for and enjoyment of reading. The curriculum is sequenced to ensure a student's wide exposure to essential reading skills. The…

A study examined the effects of prior knowledge and the explicitness of text connectivity on various measures of reading ability. Subjects were 130 eighth grade students who read 6 prose passages that had been manipulated for content familiarity and for use of explicit connectives and implied connectives (those brought about by the author's…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…