This paper identifies and discusses the variables that influence the success of an individualized reading program: the personnel, pupils, and materials. Variables related to personnel include the teacher's attitudes, beliefs, competencies, and skills concerning individualized instruction. Although research has not yet clarified what type of child…

The purpose of this study was to determine empirically the individual components of critical reading tests and subtests, enabling inferences to be made about the definitions of critical reading and critical thinking and about the relationship between them. The subjects were 50 Hillsborough County, Florida, fifth graders, most of whom were white…

The major concern of this study was to investigate the reading interests of sixth grade pupils. A questionnaire was developed to determine the reading interests of the children. Comparisons were made between the expressed reading interests of the pupils and the content of five sixth basic readers. Some of the conclusions were: the interests of…

Each of two experimenters taught one set of 32 prekindergarteners to discriminate four different letter combinations (R-P, Y-V, C-G, and K-X). Each set of children was randomly selected and assigned to two treatment conditions. The treatment consisted of three warm-up trials, 10 actual training trials, and four post-test trials on a…

A reconstructive approach to memory for connected discourse is contrasted with orientations that emphasize passive reproduction. Conditions under which reconstructive errors in recall should occur are specified. Most conventional experiments do not satisfy the conditions. In an experiment involving 360 college students, subjects were induced not…

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of auditory memory tests to predict reading achievement of elementary pupils. Auditory memory was defined as the ability of an individual to reproduce digits, letters, sounds, words, or serial commands, immediately and correctly, in sequential order, after having heard them only once. One hundred…

The development of a psychology of instruction calls for qualitative, as well as quantitative, information about curriculum components. An analysis of selected instructional sequences of the New Primary Grades Reading System, a reading acquisition curriculum for five and six year olds, was performed by applying appropriate category systems from…

The Institute for Research on Teaching, a major center funded by the National Institute of Education, has as its central mission the determination of the mental life and decision-making processes of teachers, with particular reference to the teaching of reading. The Teachers' Conceptions of Reading Project, part of the Institute, is exploring…

This study explores the relationship between children's metalinguistic awareness of aural word boundaries and their reading achievement and was designed to answer the following questions: (1) Does a child's knowledge of spoken word boundaries improve with age? (2) What is the relationship between children's conceptions of spoken words and their…

The purpose of this investigation was to study the effect of controlling the letters used in words both for a training program designed to improve visual discrimination and for a word recognition task. The experiment was designed to investigate the influence of simultaneous and successive discrimination learning with stimuli which varied in…

Field-independent and field-dependent college students studied a 1525-word article under a preferred or nonpreferred study condition (read only, underline, or note taking). Half of the subjects reviewed the material prior to an examination and half did not. Results indicated that field-independent subjects who used a nonpreferred study technique…

In two experiments, college students who supplied the last words of sentences they read learned more than subjects who simply read whole sentences. This facilitation was observed even with a list of sentences which were almost always completed with the wrong words. However, proactive interference attributable to acquisition errors appeared on…

In a study designed to investigate whether the meaning of printed words is perceived directly in rapid silent reading or by means of phonetic recoding, subjects named pictures on which words or nonwords were superimposed as distractors. In a Stroop task of this kind, distractor words that are not congruent with the names of the pictures on which…

The Basic Word Vocabulary Test (BWVT) was extended downward by administering it orally to 96 pupils selected randomly from grades one through four. Estimates of aural understanding vocabulary at each grade were obtained and were found to be much lower than results from previous studies, due to the strict criteria of the BWVT. Correlations with the…

Published and unpublished studies of factors related to reading comprehension in business communication are briefly summarized. Factors considered include organization of copy, format and appearance, graphics, distractions, reading time, listening versus reading, reader attributes, and readability. (AA)