College students in a reading rate improvement course participated in a study (1) to determine the effects of text displayed on the computer screen as opposed to the printed page and (2) to see if computerized speed reading programs changed student attitudes toward reading efficiency exercises. Subjects, 26 students of similar reading…

Twenty college students read passages from John Steinbeck's "Log from the Sea of Cortez," so that the effect of their study strategies on their recall of idea units in the passages could be tested, both immediately after reading and after a one-week delay. The experiment provided a comparison of the effectiveness of two imposed study patterns, a…

To evaluate different strategies for improving students' comprehension skills, particularly their inference ability, 42 fifth grade students identified as good or average readers were placed into one of three groups for an eight-week instructional period. Students in one group, the Content and Structure group, received systematic attention, story…

Approximately 100 questionnaires were distributed to parents of children in primary grades in a study that explored social correlates of the interpretative abilities of very young children in the assessment of televised narratives. The questionnaires contained over 50 questions on home use of television. The second phase of the study involved…

A study investigated whether there would be a significant improvement in the reading comprehension test scores of hearing-impaired secondary school students if their content area subjects included closed captioned television lessons. Subjects, eight students in an experimental group and five students in a control group, were grouped according to…

Focusing on the ways in which skilled readers detect ironic subtexts in nonfiction prose, a study examined strategies used by readers to infer writers' aims in ironic discourse and compared these strategies with those revealed by other recent reading process studies. Subjects, six graduate students and five college freshmen, were asked to read…

In a study designed to further define individual differences in reading comprehension, 200 students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a large urban university participated in an experiment that investigated the relationship between personality type and reading comprehension. The students took a reading comprehension test consisting of…

In response to teachers' requests for specific information about implementing the curriculum in the Expository Writing Program (EWP), this manual presents the instructional methods and materials used during the Teaching Expository Reading and Writing Project. First, the lines of research that formed the basis for the instructional program are…

A study examined whether writing instruction focusing on organizational patterns has a significant effect on reading comprehension. Writing samples were obtained from 18 second graders, nine of whom received no instruction, while the other nine received instruction on the purpose and use of the topic sentence, adding details to the topic, and…

To be effective learners, students should know about the state or level of their learning and the success of the strategies they are using, so that when they misunderstand a concept they can do additional reading or consult outside sources. Traditionally, textbook study has been taught through the use of so-called formula techniques, where the…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

A study compared and evaluated alternative theoretical models of the relationship of learning to read and learning to write at beginning and advanced levels of reading development. The reading dimensions of the three models included word analysis, vocabulary, and sentence and passage comprehension components. The writing dimensions included…

A study was conducted to apply what is known about how expository text structure variables enhance main idea comprehension and to determine if restructuring content textbook passages improves such comprehension. Original texts were rewritten to be more "considerate" as follows: the paragraph main ideas were rewritten and placed in the…

College students can read, but they often lack the prereading and postreading skills needed to help them think about and respond to what they read. A three-step plan can help students read and understand the text more fully. The first step entails using measures of fitness to determine: (1) the grade level of the text being considered and how it…

The information in this guide is arranged to provide Title I reading teachers with (1) a list of materials that are coordinated with the performance objectives forming the core of the educational program for Title I students, and (2) suggested teaching strategies for each performance objective. Content of the guide is divided into the following…