Recent research findings have shown a positive relationship between achievement and the amount of time students engage in learning activities. Since the greatest percentage of class time is allocated to seatwork, with worksheets being the most frequently used activity, a study investigated the effects of using three types of worksheet tasks on…

Although content related questions may indicate the depth of a readers' understanding of a passage, they do not necessarily help readers develop more general strategies for extracting information from print. A program of strategies to develop comprephension skills should include prereading instruction, activities that increase awareness of written…

The purpose of this study was to examine theories of reading comprehension and instruction as they relate to instructional practices in the middle grades. Following an extensive review of literature in the theoretical areas upon which reading programs are normally based--reading, language, learning, and teaching--specific characteristics within…

Thirty-six students participated in a study of a program designed to help first-year medical students construct an ideational scaffolding as they attempted to understand their texts. They were divided into two groups: an experimental group that was given an instructional program on how to develop a hierarchical structure while reading, and a…

The report presents the results of an Office of Demographic Studies study of the communication patterns of a national sample of 657 hearing impaired children. The extent to which various modes of communication (such as manual or oral) are used with hearing impaired children is examined, and the relationships between communication patterns and a…

The effects of vocabulary instruction on word knowledge and reading comprehension were assessed in three experiments. In experiment one, employing 12 "average" fourth grade readers, and experiment two, employing six learning disabled intermediate level students, word synonyms were taught to pairs of students on three consecutive days.…

To determine whether poor readers employ less efficient strategies in processing logical connectives than do good readers, 34 ninth grade students participated in a study. Half of the students were good readers and half were poor readers. An acquisition list consisting of 18 target sentences and 6 fillers was constructed. A list of 42 recognition…

A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

Reading is comprehension, it is a complex network of interrelated skills, and it involves several levels of thinking, but in a holistic rather than in a molecular response to the text. The practice of reading based on this theoretical understanding involves identifying levels of comprehension; noting that levels of comprehending are not strictly…

Twenty subjects from the United States and nineteen from India read letters describing a typical Indian and a typical American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. Among the findings were that subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally…

In the past, writers have chosen stylistic devices within the parameters of the traditional grammar of style, "Grammar A," characterized by analyticity, coherence, and clarity. But many contemporary writers are creating a new grammar of style, "Grammar B," characterized by synchronicity, discontinuity, and ambiguity, which…

To determine whether readers read and recall news stories better when they are accompanied by photographs and whether photograph size affects reading and recalling, three versions of the front page of a newspaper were produced. Each version of the front page contained a news story and a related photograph which had been altered to constitute one…

Three methods of preposed questioning aimed at improving student comprehension of short stories were tested with a group of high school students. The methods were as follows: teacher-prepared, preposed questions, self-preposed questions (student-prepared), and schema self-preposed questions (embodying teacher-specified limitations within which…

Recent research in reading comprehension suggests that there are substantial differences between individuals in their patterns of resource allocation to text-based (bottom-up) and knowledge-based (top-down) reading processes. Less able readers tend to overrely on processes in one direction, producing deleterious effects on comprehension. Factors…

This taxonomy is designed to be used by teachers who are preparing New York state students to take the Tests of General Educational Development (GED). The skills included in this taxonomy are representative of those skills which must be mastered in order to pass the reading skills test of the current six-hour GED. Educational objectives in the…