A study explored the relationship of interest in story content, external incentives, and reading level to elementary school children's reading performance. The subjects, 75 fifth grade students who were either average or below-average readers, were asked to rate the content of five stories from "most" to "least" interesting and were then assigned…

Maintaining that critical reading is critical thinking, this paper presents a teaching method that adapts the critical thinking/reading process to the model of reading proposed by W. S. Gray. The paper describes the four steps of the Gray model (word perception, comprehension of persuasive language, student judgment of the soundness of the…

A study examined how children visualize, draw, and make inferences about story content presented either aurally on tape or as an animated film. Audio versions of the story were manipulated to include short descriptions, in either literal or nonliteral language, directly analogous to the film's visual depiction at four points in the story. These…

Using a text semantic framework, a two-year study examined the process by which readers construct meanings from standardized reading comprehension tests used as texts. The text analytic system described "ideal reader" interpretations of texts, allowing comparisons with real reader interpretations. Specific analyses described the ideal…

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification device that orders educational objectives in a hierarchical fashion, ranging from relatively simple skills of remembering to more complex skills of evaluating and judging. In the classroom, the taxonomy can be used as the basis of a series of questioning strategies designed to foster intellectual skills. In a…

Formative research on the eye movements of children in the older age range of "Sesame Street's" target audience was conducted and results were used to answer a range of formative questions concerning television programing goals and their implementation. Forty-six low-income, black and caucasian children, ranging in age from 4.9 to 6.9…

This report presents a pilot study which collected preadolescents' retrospective reports of their preschool experiences with the television program, "Sesame Street." One-hundred-five fifth and sixth graders ranging from 9 to 12 years of age were asked to think back to when they viewed "Sesame Street" in their younger years and…

A study examined whether (1) the performance of students on text explicit (TE), text implicit (TI), and script implicit (SI) questions inserted in a text would vary as a function of the type of question received; (2) students responding in writing to the inserted questions would perform at a higher level on a subsequent criterion test than those…

A cognitive approach to the interrelation of writing and reading assumes that production and comprehension of written text depend upon cognitive and affective schemata used in concert by a writer or reader to produce or encode, store, and retrieve text information. Both comprehending and composing are basic, complex, interactive processes with…

Theory and research in reading comprehension have confirmed the important role of text structure in learning from written materials. The previous work with story grammars provided the basis of this attempt to define frames for explanations in history that would be likely to aid learning. A suggested goal frame includes the goals, plan, action, and…

Containing data gathered in the 1979-80 assessment of reading and literature conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this report is devoted to the results of the reading comprehension and study skills portions of the assessment. A brief introduction provides information about the students surveyed and the measures used…