This report describes the rationale and procedures for a series of studies related to reading tasks and reading texts. Children's reading tasks are examined in five strands of investigation: ability to read for meaning, ability to read for doing, ability to read for remembering, comprehension difficulties in skilled readers, and classroom…

Some practical ways to improve reading skills in social studies classes without sacrificing content objectives and goals are presented. It is emphasized that social studies teachers are best suited to teach reading skills in their own subject field. Social studies teachers need to focus on three reading skills: vocabulary development and word…

Standardized reading tests exert a great influence on curriculum materials, teaching methods, and student perceptions of the nature of reading; these tests must reflect the best recent research findings. Passage dependency research has attempted to increase the accuracy of reading tests, and has focused on the following four areas: (1) reading…

It is difficult to account for the real and easily measured differences in verbal competence. Differential psychologists investigate basic traits from which observed behavior is thought to be generated, but if thinking is viewed as a problem in information handling, research will more profitably focus on the relationship between behavior in…

Instructors can use this inventory to prepare high school equivalency students for the reading skills test of the new form of the Test of General Educational Development (GED). It replaces the instrument previously recommended for that purpose, the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED). Fifty multiple choice questions test the ability to…

Teachers can help students develop effective content reading/study skills by manipulating the presentation of reading materials in such a way that students can see and internalize model behaviors associated with those skills. For example, teachers can augment paragraphs of content materials with short exercises in using context clues to infer the…

The first segment of a two-part general report of a province-wide reading assessment program in British Columbia, this report describes and analyzes the reading test results of students in grades 8 and 12 in the domains of word meaning identification, comprehension of prose, applied reading, and study skills. The chapters of the report provide…

A review of the research on study techniques indicates that reading and generating questions from the material is an effective technique for ensuring better comprehension. Familiarity with a model of studying that divides studying into prereading, reading, and postreading provides one explanation for this effectiveness. In prereading, students…

To determine if there are qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the syntactic errors committed by good and poor readers, two studies were conducted. In the first, 31 third graders, grouped as either good or poor readers according to reading grade equivalent scores, completed a 300 word cloze passage. The results suggested that poor…

The ability of primary grade black students to recover deep structure and the degree to which that ability is affected by socioeconomic status, dialect, word recognition, and the child's management of syntactic structures in oral language (oral syntactic control) were investigated in a study involving 125 second grade students. The Deep Structure…

This report evaluates the the teacher training and tutorial program in reading in New York City. The program was designed to offer after school instruction in 13 elementary schools and 4 junior high schools. Three hundred ninety elementary school students and 120 junior high students in grades two through nine participated in the program. Tutorial…

This report, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," describes a Title I sequential reading support program for educationally disadvantaged junior high school students and analyzes the vocabulary and reading comprehension test results of this program for the school year 1972-1973. After group and individual pretesting in reading and…

Starting with a model for explaining comprehension and noncomprehension of verbal material in terms of a match/mismatch principle, this project developed a scale of language usage and explored hypotheses about how comprehension may become possible if a child does not now comprehend some particular oral or written text. Eight separate reports are…

Reader ability to predict text structure based on previous experiences with written language appears to be an important foundation for comprehension of reading materials. A pilot study was conducted to explore ways of comparing the story structure awareness of beginning readers. Story schema analyses of stories told by eight first-graders--four…

Classroom teachers frequently need techniques for assessing students' reading comprehension; the retelling technique is a useful tool for this purpose. The technique is divided into two parts, the unaided retelling and the aided or directed retelling. During both parts, open-ended, divergent questioning techniques are used. An excerpt from a…