This study was an investigation into the relationships between reading interests and reading comprehension as demonstrated by a group of fifth-graders who rated reading passages for interest and then were checked for comprehension of these same passages. A seven-point rating inventory, ranging from a "liked very, very much" rating to a "disliked…

Recent research indicates that boys read as well as girls if given high-interest material but read more poorly if given low-interest material. This study investigated possible factors contributing to the facilitating effect of interest of boys. Two experiments were performed to learn whether high-interest topics are associated with traditionally…

The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of…

The cloze procedure, a technique for determining the difficulty level of written material, involves the systematic deletion of words from a prose selection and the supplying of the missing words by a student or a group of students. The students' ability to supply these words is a significant indicator of how well they comprehend the written…

Comprehension levels necessary to the acquisition and retention of facts, concepts, and rules and the facilitating effects of the use of orienting directions and postadjunct questions were investigated in a study involving 105 sixth-grade students. Four treatment groups each received a version of a six-page fictional passage, differing in the use…

Readability has been gauged by such means as determining the length of individual words in a passage, analyzing types of sentences, and assessing numbers of subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, modifiers, and so on. Probably the most successful formula has been the Dale-Chall method, which measures readability by determining the percentage…

Confluent education is the intentional integration of the affective and the cognitive domain in curriculum design and classroom teaching. The purpose of this study was to define, operationalize, and empirically evaluate a confluent reading/English fundamentals curriculum for community college students. A theoretical model was developed to describe…

The purpose of this practicum was to develop a supplemental reading program to meet the reading needs of upper-grade pupils in the elementary school. This program utilizes commercial television programs as the medium for: viewing of the taped program; reading of the program script; instruction in word knowledge, decoding, and comprehension skills…

This study investigated two approaches to vocabulary development with intermediate grade Menominee Indian children. Specifically, the differences in reading comprehension, writing vocabulary, reading vocabulary, and attitudes toward reading of students were examined. The two methods compared were (1) the Native American Culturally-Oriented…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of specific training procedures developed to enhance the use of context as an aid to word recognition and comprehension. A series of sixteen audio-tapes and accompanying printed materials were designed and field tested in this study. Forty-eight nine- and ten-year-old subjects were…

Many young children are being placed in a formal reading program before they are cognitively ready. Jean Piaget's developmental theory challenges educators to begin viewing learning and cognitive development from the child's point of view. Interpreters of Piaget's theory have addressed themselves to the teaching of math and science concepts, but…

This study was designed to confirm the hypothesis that objectives which focused on items of information best facilitated reading retention among a population of elementary school children while controlling for the children's reading level rather than for the "density" of the reading passage. Two 550-word reading passages taken from "Life in the…

The objectives of this study were to determine the effect post-adjunct questions exert on: learning from oral and written instruction, learning by high and low ability readers, and learning material which requires different levels of intellectual processing. No significant main effects occurred between question and no-question groups. Post-adjunct…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether practice in transformational sentence combining will aid students' reading comprehension by giving them a large repetoire of syntactic constructions from which to draw when matching constructions contained in the materials they are expected to read. The first section of the document discusses the…

It was hypothesized in this study that those students exhibiting concrete operational intelligence, which can be measured by a standardized test of conservation, would perform adequately on a test of reading comprehension. One-hundred six first-grade students from a consolidated school system in North Central Pennsylvania were tested with a…