Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…

A study was carried out to discover if readers responded affectively to the connotative meanings of certain words and if better readers were more or less responsive to these connotations than were average or poor readers. A total of 120 students in five intact eleventh grade classes completed semantic differential scales to measure both individual…

This report was prepared to assist the United States Army in evaluating the usefulness of readability formulas in identifying material that will be comprehended by readers at a given reading skill level. Existing readability methods and research findings were reviewed against three major criterion questions and the findings are discussed. The…

In an effort to comply with bilingual instruction requirements, school districts throughout California will soon be involved in testing vast numbers of children to determine language proficiency and language dominance. Many language tests will require a child to repeat a sentence or a phrase in exactly the same manner that is stated by an examiner…

A college survival skills course, designed to help college-bound high school seniors develop an efficient, organized approach to college reading and study skills, is described in this paper. After outlining the steps taken in developing and promoting the course, the paper notes favorable reactions to it, lists the course textbooks, and describes…

B. J. F. Meyer's approach to prose analysis is utilized in this paper to examine differences in learning and memory of text by readers across the adult lifespan. The analysis system is described briefly and compared to other approaches. Several studies are then summarized that employ this hierarchical analysis system to study learner…

THIS DOCUMENT IS A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES WRITTEN BY MEMBERS OF THE COLORADO INDIAN EDUCATION WORKSHOP. THE ARTICLES ARE CONCERNED WITH THE PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL, CULTURAL, MORAL, EMOTIONAL, AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF BILINGUAL-BICULTURAL CHILDREN, AS A MEANINGFUL CURRICULUM IS DEVELOPED TO CORRELATE WITH THEIR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT.…

SIXTY URBAN, MIDDLE-CLASS, FOURTH-GRADE TEACHERS IN THE SOUTHWEST WERE GIVEN THE EDWARDS PERSONAL PREFERENCE SCHEDULE (EPPS) AS A MEASURE OF PERSONALITY. THEIR CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR WAS THEN RECORDED ON A TEACHER OBSERVATION PERSONALITY SCHEDULE REFLECTING EDWARDS' DEFINITIONS OF HIS NEEDS FOR ACHIEVEMENT, ABASEMENT, AFFILIATION, DOMINANCE, CHANGE,…

A study involving students in two English classes and two algebra classes at the College of Alameda was conducted to assess the correlation between a student's grade achievement and his/her ability to read at the level at which the course text was written. The Fry Readability Scale was used to determine the reading level of the course texts and…

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be…

A study was conducted to test the proposition that the act of oral reading would be significantly different between competent and incompetent writers and the corollary proposition that the act of oral reading closely approximates the act of writing. A writing sample was devised that included three major features: all the common marks of…

Hartford, Connecticut's Intensive Reading Instructional Teams (IRIT) were designed to improve achievement levels of elementary pupils deficient in basic language and reading skills. In 1978-1979, 683 students in grades two through six received instruction in reading vocabulary and comprehension and in decoding. This report updates and expands an…

This working paper is a report of a study of the meanings 10 children derived from the experience of being taught to read in first grade. The study is based on a series of classroom observations and conversations with the children, their parents and teachers over a 10-month period in two first grade classrooms of a public elementary school in an…

This paper provides a brief survey of current theory concerning reading comprehension and suggests that the role of the reader's knowledge has been largely neglected. Factors that influence the assessment of information or idea gain are the nature of the learner, the nature of the material, the nature of the purposes for reading, and the means…

The process of acquiring knowledge from texts is considered from two perspectives: the learning of the individual facts in the text, and the integration of the facts into a coherent representation reflecting relations among the facts. The former process is presumed to depend on the linguistics content of the text, while the latter process depends…