A study investigated whether reading instruction that emphasizes critical thinking would benefit "learning-disabled" fifth-grade students. Seven students were assigned to an instructional group that participated in a program of 10 dialogical-thinking reading lessons and 7 were assigned to a comparison group that remained with the…

A study examined whether first-grade children comprehended less-familiar vocabulary from four "Mother Goose" nursery rhymes and whether the children used auditory context clues and/or visual illustrations to comprehend unknown vocabulary in the nursery rhymes. Subjects, 40 children from suburban areas and 40 children from urban areas,…

A study examined the developmental shifts in the importance of linguistic components of words to single word decoding. Subjects, 1200 children ages 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12.5 years who were the normative sample of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), were tested using a word recognition test, the Reading Decoding Subtest of the K-ABC.…

A study examined the differences between new and old editions of basal reading programs. Two editions, 1979 and 1986, of the Houghton Mifflin basal reading program for first grade were analyzed. Results indicated that there were substantial differences in both decoding and comprehension activities, and in the stories children read. The newer…

A broad gap exists between research findings on reading and the application of these findings to the classroom. Commonly held beliefs of administrators and teachers that present formidable obstacles to the translation of research findings into action include: (1) many research designs are too complex and difficult to understand; (2) many research…

A study was conducted to determine if teachers of disadvantaged children encountered instructional problems in reading that teachers of students who are not disadvantaged did not. A questionnaire was distributed to 12 grades-one-through-four teachers in a school serving the disadvantaged and 12 teachers in a school in which students were not…

G. Wolford's perturbation model of letter identification is designed to account for identification errors of briefly presented characters. Its chief assumptions are that features are extracted in parallel, that some of these features become perturbed or mislocalized, and that mislocalizations are more likely to occur in the direction of the fovea…

Intended for use by educators and administrators working in textbook-connected projects, this report reviews the problems encountered in textbook production and distribution in developing nations and indicates some solutions that have been found for many of those problems. The first major section of the report focuses on the role of governments in…

A study investigated how comprehension, as measured by the accuracy and speed of performance, is affected by the information contained in a set of procedural instructions. Using instructions that were varied with respect to the mode of presentation (pictures, text, or pictures and text) and the degree of explicitness of operational information, 68…

To examine the comprehension process employed by gifted readers and to identify the various metacognitive strategies they employ, 100 gifted student volunteers in grades 4 through 7 were administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), Reading Subtests 11 and 13. The students also completed a questionnaire to determine metacognitive awareness…

To determine the effects, if any, that one-parent families have on reading achievement, a study compared the 1983 California Achievement Reading Test scores of children in grades two through four who were from one-parent families, with scores of those from two-parent families. Twelve children were used in each group. Total reading scores were…

To test the hypothesis that aspects of one's personality are associated with expansion of his or her vocabulary, a study focused on thirteen students of various ages who constituted a vocabulary development class. Students were taught techniques for discovering meaning through context or extracting meaning through word structure. Considerable time…

Several hundred men who were dyslexic as high school students, and for whom considerable early test data were available, were surveyed as adults. Subjects included alumni from 1940 through 1977 of the Gow School, a private secondary school for dyslexic boys. Their occupations were compared to those of a control group, the fathers of both groups,…

Concludes that low achievers benefit from counseling-oriented reading programs. (RB)