The first part of this paper on prose analysis explains how structural analysis of text can be used in reading research. This explanation focuses on three methodological uses of prose analysis: (1) the identification of the content and organization of the text for use in a scoring system, (2) the measurement of variations between the text and the…

A study examined the teachers' manuals for five basal reader programs, kindergarten through grade six, to discover their recommendations for comprehension instruction. The series analyzed were "Pathfinder," published by Allyn and Bacon; "Reading 720," by Ginn and Company; "Bookmark Reading Program," by Harcourt,…

Children and adult readers were compared for the degree to which they were able to avoid grapheme-to-phoneme translation in word naming, for how much they benefited from redundant phonemic information, and for the degree to which they were disturbed by minor changes in graphemes that were still phonemically appropriate. Hebrew was the target…

Differences in semantic recall between students hypothesized as having either a high or a low analytic style were investigated. Styles were determined by the amount of bilateral alpha activity measured from the cerebral cortex of the brain during eyes-open baseline recordings. The results indicated that when expository text was tightly structured,…

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of isolating and identifying generalities and instances in written prose instruction on student performance. Eighty college students were given either a typical chapter from a college textbook that included a summary, the same chapter with the summary removed, a modified version of the chapter in…

A study was conducted to find a manipulation that could be performed on a text (roughly analogous to real instructional material) which would lead readers to process that text more efficiently. One-hundred five college students were placed into either an experimental or a control group. Students in the control group were given an unchanged version…

Ninety college students wrote free-recall protocols immediately after reading each of three different passages in a study of how three factors affected the comprehension and recall of expository discourse. The three factors were the order in which a passage was read within a series of passages, the rhetorical predicate structure of the passage…

A study examined the effect on speed and comprehension performance of one silent rereading following an initial silent reading. Each of 17 fourth grade students silently read two 500-word selections, which were written at the third grade level, and then responded orally to 20 literal and above-literal questions based on the materials. The silent…

A study was conducted to analyze and compare the reading interests of adults from three educational levels. Fourteen adults in a community college reading center, 20 adults from various professional occupations, and 23 adults from a reading education class were given a reading interest inventory concerned with their reading habits and preferences…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

A study of the effects of using the MRM (message unit--verb unit--message unit) instructional system on reading comprehension was studied using 69 college freshmen, 37 in an experimental group and 32 in a control group. Both groups were engaged in a variety of activities designed to promote greater reading efficiency as a regular part of their…

In order to analyze the reading and comprehension of college students using a computer video terminal (CRT), a computer program was designed to present text material, time the performance, and compute the rate of reading for each of 118 subjects. Specifically, the program sought to determine if reading and comprehension are affected by the CRT…

This is the second volume in a series that records the official Symposium Proceedings of the Jean Piaget Society and examines the theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of Jean Piaget's seminal epistemology. The 12 papers are divided into four areas: language development, formal reasoning, social cognition, and applied research. The topics of…

A study was conducted to examine three fundamental aspects of the process of responding to a literary work of art: the nature of the reader's response to literature, the processes of response to literature, and the relationship of a reader's personal construct system to the way in which the reader responds to a literary work of art. The subjects…

New information about reading comprehension (specifically schema theory) was applied to the teaching of literature in a study involving 33 high school students enrolled in two American literature classes. In particular, the study examined the ways in which knowledge of background information about a work could influence students' comprehension of…