Intended primarily for teachers and administrators, this paper presents 20 guidelines as the basis for an evaluation procedure for workbook, skillbook, and ditto master components of basal reading programs. The paper begins with a discussion of how and why workbooks are used in the classroom, a description of the original study from which the…

Concludes that cue systems within words (graphics) are affected by syntactic and semantic cue systems within the sentences. (RB)

Describes Simuread, a computer program which is designed to aid in reading instruction, and illustrates its research applications. (RB)

Reports on a study to determine differences in measured self-concept among college freshmen grouped by demonstrated differences in reading ability, by sex, and by enrollment in a reading skills program. (RB)

Concludes that some sociological and adjustment factors are related to scholastic achievement. (RB)

Presents the results of a research study which was designed to determine gains or losses in reading proficiency during summer vacation, investigate the characteristics of those students whose proficiency increases or decreases, and aid in planning summer reading programs which maximize gains and minimize losses. (RB)

Discusses the results of a survey of children's reading interests classified by age and by sex within age levels. (TO)

This paper describes a computational approach to certain problems of anaphora in natural language and argues in favor of formal meaning representation languages (MRLs) for natural language. After presenting arguments in favor of formal meaning representation languages, appropriate MRLs are discussed. Minimal requirements include provisions for…

College undergraduates read a story about two boys playing hooky from school from the perspective of either a burglar or a person interested in buying a home. After recalling the story once, subjects were directed to shift perspectives and then recall the story again. In two experiments, subjects produced on the second recall significantly more…

In order to obtain information on the reading skill levels of Naval recruits for use in improving their reading skills, the United States Navy administered the Gates-MacGinite reading test to all available recruits in its training programs between May 1974 and May 1975. The relationship of those test scores to other personnel data indicated that a…

The hypothesis that pragmatic inferences presented in text are taken for granted, superficially processed, and not stably or enduringly represented in memory was investigated. Stories were read which in some conditions contained information vitiating the implicational force of explicit inferences. The vitiating information was presented either…

Although college teachers of English face a very real economic crisis, the current intellectual crisis is even more significant. The first failure of this intellectual crisis involves what we have done: we have replaced true scholarship with the new interpretation of texts, mistakenly believing that we need not know any outside knowledge of a…

This paper reviews recent theoretical developments and empirical findings in the area of the development of word knowledge in children. Advances in both linguistic and cognitive theory are described and synthesized, and children's word knowledge at various stages of development is outlined. The point is made that asking meaningful questions about…

Three studies were performed to test the feasibility of the PLATO Computer Assisted Instruction system for on-line testing of reading skills. In Study 1, three different approaches to vocabulary assessment were tested: self-screening, synonym, and word matching under brief exposure. One hundred ten subjects from a Chicago, Illinois, public…

Since not everything that is understood is remembered and not everything that is remembered is understood, models of language processing should be able to make a distinction between comprehension and memory. To this end, a case is made for a spreading activation process as being the essential ingredient of the comprehension process. Concepts…