An outline is given of a model procedure by which teachers can ascertain the reading level of students so they may match the students' ability in reading comprehension with the subject content of a course. This six-step model may be viewed as a continuum of material and student assessment, teaching, evaluation, and reassessment of material and…

Students in 61 English classes at an urban high school participated in an investigation of the effects of sustained silent reading (SSR) on their reading comprehension skills and on their atttiudes toward reading. SSR calls for a systematic structured time in school for students to read books of their choosing without being tested when the reading…

This study indicates that the way in which stories are presented to children (verbal versus pictorial) makes little or no difference in the children's comprehension or recall of the stories. Ninety-six kindergarten and second grade children either looked at a series of pictures (and were told they formed a story) or listened to the story through a…

The purpose of this current research effort was to identify and validate the effectiveness of alternative learning strategies. Learners employing networking and interactive peer study substrategies achieved more than did no-treatment controls. Similarly, strategies-trained learners reported greater positive learning attitude changes than did…

To determine whether increasing decoding speed affects the comprehension of poor readers, two experiments were designed to test two groups consisting of seven good readers and eleven poor readers chosen from fourth and fifth grade. In the first experiment, poor readers were trained to read a list of words as rapidly as the good readers and were…

Recent research projects have indicated that a majority of adolescent and adult students have not reached a formal level of cognitive functioning and must therefore be taught rhetorical modes such as comparison and classification. A study was constructed to investigate the cognitive skills development of average college freshmen and to test…

The impact of the Right to Read program in Spencer, Massachusetts, and the 11 other Massachusetts Charter communities was investigated in the following respects: to assess changes in teachers' perceptions toward the reading program, to compare the perceptions of school and community populations, to measure the amount of children's reading, to…

The Degrees of Reading Power test (DRP) and its related technology are described in this publication. It contains a brief description of the DRP, which was designed to measure the most difficult level of text that a student can read with comprehension; a report on the validation of the test; sample DRP passages; an instructional viewpoint as it…

To evaluate the performance of elementary school children on various paradigms for assessing vocabulary knowledge on-line, three studies were conducted. In the first, 173 second through eighth grade students were involved in an investigation of five approaches to vocabulary assessment: synonym in context, synonym out of context, cloze, oral…

This curriculum guide, designed to facilitate nutrition education in grades K through 3, can be used as a basis for curriculum development at the school district level or as a basis for teachers' daily lesson planning. Curriculum materials are prefaced by a list of nutrition concepts and understandings, an objective-based grade placement chart and…

This guide was developed for parents of young children to help them improve the child's ability to listen, to discriminate different sounds, and to understand and remember what is heard. Background information on the development of listening skills is presented and general guidelines for conducting listening games are offered. Activities are…

The eight articles in this booklet suggest activities designed to help students see drama as an active, engaging pursuit. The first article uses excerpts from Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" to illustrate how improvisation can be used to help students discover meaning in a play. The second and third articles provide suggestions for…

A technique called "co-communication" was developed to improve the listening skills of dental school faculty. In co-communication, paired individuals take turns playing the roles of talker and listener for designated times, usually about 20 minutes each. The structure of the sessions and their continuity are necessary to ensure individual growth…

The first of three volumes of an integrated course in intermediate Persian is presented. Emphasis is on the "four skills approach," involving speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing. Ideally students completing all the volumes should be able to read most texts of medium difficulty independently using a dictionary, carry on simple free…

The seventeenth of 20 volumes of lessons designed for use in a full-time, intensive training program in Arabic is presented. The lessons in this volume are concerned with increasing reading comprehension skills. Passages in both journalistic and literary style are reproduced. Various kinds of vocabulary building and reading comprehension exercises…