The background, challenge, opportunity, and excitement of hermeneutics can be explored in three signposts of a hermeneutic turn in a doctoral research proposal: from being gifted to gifted reading, from method to interpretation, and from metacognition to the hermeneutic circle. A change in the research site of a study of the metacognitive…

A study examined the effectiveness of Reading Recovery programs at 36 Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS). Annually, approximately 500 "below grade level" students are given the opportunity to become independent readers through this program. Major findings are: (1) Reading Recovery students significantly outperformed students not in…

As educators continue to debate the value of phonic versus meaning-based approaches to reading, a significant number of children continue to fail to learn to read. One of the fundamental tasks facing the beginning reader is to develop the realization that speech can be segmented and that these segmented units can be represented by printed forms. A…

Reading is an important activity for all children to be able to do regardless of ability. Many children in classrooms around the country struggle with reading and need some extra support and attention. Determining student attitudes can help the teacher to provide the necessary services to those that need help to improve their reading. Students in…

An action research project described a program for improving reading skills and comprehension through the use of parental involvement. The targeted population consisted of primary students located at four different sites in Northern Illinois. The problem of low reading achievement was documented through data revealing a large number of students…

Reading response groups are an outgrowth of theories which suggest that: (1) meaning derived from text is highly individualized and personal, and (2) reader understanding is deepened through interactions among peers. A study examined the non-participation in one reading response group composed of four high-achieving adult readers who were…

A study compared two groups of children attending two urban elementary schools who were unready for first grade at the conclusion of kindergarten. One group of 23 students was retained in kindergarten while the other group of 117 was promoted to the first grade. The California Test of Basic Skills was used to measure the reading ability of both…

A notable feature of current approaches to reading (in first or second language) is a preoccupation with the internal "causes" of comprehension, regarded as a terminal state of the cognitive system. Yet by allowing only for a private encounter between reader and text, the cognitive approach lacks terms to give more than a contingent…

A study investigated whether classroom reading instruction that focuses students' attention on story characters' motives and feelings improves their narrative comprehension. The subjects for this study were 48 third-grade students from 3 different classrooms in the same school. Two different treatments were used: the External Events (control)…

A study compared a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model with a more traditional symbolic information processing model that accounts for early reading acquisition by human subjects. Two experimental paradigms were simulated. In one paradigm (a "savings" paradigm) subjects were divided into two groups and trained with two sets of…

A study identified a list of trade books that educators selected for use in their own classrooms and a list of factors that they considered to be the most important when selecting those books. Subjects, 486 educators who taught in grades 4, 5, or 6 in 45 public school districts and 15 private schools in southeastern Pennsylvania, identified two…

A study compared the choices of Charlottesville area children with those from Children's Choice lists, published annually in "The Reading Teacher." Subjects, 62 third- to sixth-grade students, were interviewed before they checked books out of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library Main Branch in Charlottesville, Virginia. Children were…

A study compared students' cognitive word knowledge of the cognates of "think" and "know" within a theoretical framework focused on hierarchical levels of meaning. Subjects were 31 fifth, 32 seventh, and 21 tenth graders attending single-gender private schools in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and 70 college…

A study examined the effects of training students in two kinds of self-questioning strategies, critical self-questioning and interpretive self-testing, on their acquisition of information from a science text. Subjects, 175 ninth-grade students from a junior high school in southeastern Idaho, were blocked according to their reading ability and then…

A study examined teachers' opinions as to what makes children's magazines good as well as which magazines they are currently using in their classrooms and in what ways magazines are being used. Subjects, 10 (of 19) experienced third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers at P.S. 106 in the Bronx, New York City, responded to a questionnaire concerning…