A study was conducted to examine the process of the development of knowledge structures concerning events. Specifically, it investigated (1) the ways in which individuals build theories about events as they experience them; (2) the number of events an individual must experience, and how similar those events must be, before he or she begins to…

Misleading headings in documents, which make it hard for readers to find what they need, are common in many types of documents. A review of research on the importance of cues in the reading process suggests that heading miscues might seriously impair understanding. Three experiments were conducted to discover how headings cue or miscue adult…

Although research on readability is still in its infancy, studies have been conducted concerning typographical features, semantic and pragmatic facets, linguistic factors, and orthographic dimensions. This paper discusses readability formulas, pointing out their limitations and listing 13 generalizations about them. The paper also outlines…

A propositional network system for representing the logical and semantic information contained in a text is described. The reliability of scoring information recalled from reading, using this representational system, is found to vary with the scoring goal. Determination of the amount of information recalled is found to be extremely reliable. A…

Methodological incarceration occurs when research and investigation are restricted by the traditional concepts of how a study should be designed and are hampered by those notions which dictate what research is. This paper examines several reasons why social science research in general--reading research in particular--is considered by some to be…

This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…

The purpose of this study was to either confirm or refute the claim of the producer of the Time-Life Video Tape Speed Reading system that improved speed would be independent of the time interval between the eight individual taped lessons. The English department at the Southern Technical Institute (Georgia) offered a speed reading course in three…

The extent to which 36 schools participating in the Northwest Reading Consortium adhered to the use of the Right to Read assessment and planning procedure as a means of identifying and implementing needed improvements in their reading programs is analyzed in this report. The report concludes that there was a high correlation between use of the…

After some initial comments on Robert Calfee's discussion of ways in which theory and research in reading assessment can help decision makers, the author makes two points: (1) we need to provide a much better education for reading teachers than is currently being provided, and this will require radically larger amounts of time than are currently…

Reading Grade Levels (RGLs) of 185 Rate Training Manuals (RTMs) and 188 Non-Resident Career Courses (NRCCs) were determined using the Flesch Reading Ease Score. Results indicated that the majority of the RTMs and NRCCs were written at the lower college grade level. The RGLs vary widely within each RTM and NRCC, ranging from the seventh grade to…

The computer assisted problem solving system (CAPS) described in this booklet administered "homework" problem sets designed to develop students' computational, estimation, and procedural skills. These skills were related to important concepts in an introductory statistics course. CAPS generated unique data, judged student performance,…

Fifteen children's picture books from each of three time periods--1960, 1964, and 1968--were rated using the Rokeach Value Survey in order to identify the value systems expressed in their contents and to compare these systems with those held by adults. Results indicated that the instrumental values ranked highest were loving, imagination,…

A dynamic model of reading that represents the processes of gaining idiosyncratic integrated meaning from the silent reading of continuous textual discourse has been developed. It includes the roles of the affective interactions as well as the cognitive connections and integrations energized during the silent reading of a continuous text. The…

The three articles in this newsletter focus on ideas, programs, activities, and research concerned with reading in the content areas. The individual articles contain a discussion of the general approaches that characterize many successful content area reading programs, suggestions for educators who are considering establishing such programs in…

Three problems in the use of eye movement data for the study of language processing are discussed in this report: the perceptual span problem, the data summary problem, and the eye-mind lag problem. Recent research on perception during reading that bears on these problems is also described. Finally, a general approach to the use of eye movement…