This paper suggests that by emphasizing word identification skills and oral reading and by using limited reading materials, teachers have neglected reading for meaning. Following a review of current instructional practices, the paper explains how understanding writing depends on the world experience, language knowledge, and processing strategies…

To determine the effects of active student-initiated response lessons as an alternative to teacher-directed strategies for increasing reading comprehension, third grade children were placed into either an experimental or a control group. The experimental group received a series of lessons based on active student-initiated responses. These included…

In an investigation of the effectiveness of self-managed reading improvement programs, a program incorporating self-monitoring (observing and recording relevant activity), self-reinforcement (increasing the probability of some target behavior by the self-presentation of positive consequences or the removal of negative consequences), and shaping…

Many writers have suggested that comprehension occurs at several levels (e.g., literal, inference, and conclusion). However, many teachers spend as much as two-thirds of their time on lower-level skills such as phonics and literal-level comprehension skills. Some authors have suggested ways of assisting readers in achieving comprehension at more…

Some children lack the framework of prior experience necessary for the comprehension and enjoyment of fanciful literature. Fanciful literature, though grounded in reality, deals not only with what is, but also with what could be or might have been. Since readers actively construct meaning by relating what they read to their conceptual systems,…

Presented in two reports, this study on reading comprehension investigated whether expository passages with adjacent-to-text activities facilitate the learning of reading comprehension skills at the same time that they improve comprehension of text content, and whether written feedback increases the effectiveness of adjacent-to-text activities.…

To assess whether black children comprehend more of high- than low-interest reading material, whether the performance discrepancy between white and black children is reduced under high-interest conditions, and to determine the degree of similarity of the interests of white and black children, a study involving 33 black and 33 white fifth graders…

To determine the validity of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts in predicting reading achievement as measured by the reading scores of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the Boehm test was given to 55 kindergarten children and the Iowa test was given to 42 of the same children in second grade. The results indiciated that the Boehm test appeared to be of…

A successful content area reading program not only includes reading classes that teach specific skills, but also provides for the inservice training of teachers, offering activities that facilitate student reading comprehension in the content areas. For such a program to succeed, the financial commitment and time devoted to teacher training must…

Developed in West Virginia as part of a statewide effort to improve reading achievement through a competency based staff development program, this inservice instructional packet on comprehension is one of five designed to present classroom teachers with the essential competencies and learner outcomes involved in developmental reading. The…

Students from Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies, participated in a study to determine their overall reading ability as measured by norm- and criterion-referenced reading tests and to discover the extent to which linguistically related reading difficulties were manifested in their oral and silent reading performance. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading…

A number of issues relating to metaphor are discussed in this report. Offering an account of what makes metaphors "metaphorical" (a way of understanding what metaphors are), the report also discusses some of the psychological processes associated with the comprehension of metaphor (how the understanding of metaphors might come about).…

This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

After research between 1960 and 1977 relating to college reading program effectiveness was identified, a statistical procedure called Meta-Analysis was used to integrate findings and determine any composite benefit of instruction. Of 676 references on the initial list, 66 studies were identified as having quantifiable data within the limits of the…

Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…