To determine if able and disabled college student readers can be distinguished by their awareness and use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies, 36 freshmen students enrolled in a reading and study skills class were classified as either good or poor readers based on their Nelson-Denny Reading Test scores. After reading five short passages and…

A study examined the effects of sex-typed content and sex role preference on 87 fifth grade boys' and 64 fifth grade girls' reading material preferences. It also explored how high- and low-rated sex-typed reading content and students' sex and sex role preferences influenced reading comprehension. After reading the sex-typed content, which…

After reviewing criticisms of the exclusive use of readability formulas to evaluate text difficulty and describing successful efforts to broaden the traditional readability formula approach, this report presents a 20 item checklist for determining text comprehensibility based on four criteria: (1) specific objectives or outcomes expected from the…

A study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

A study investigated whether direct instruction in story constituents and their interrelationships could enhance children's organization in story writing. It was hypothesized that the special instruction could provide children with an internalized prototype story structure that could serve as a heuristic or planning device for organizing…

Recognizing that children's spontaneous use of text structure facilitates their comprehension of expository prose, a study examined the transfer effects of graphic organizer instruction on 24 fourth grade students' ability to use top-level structure in the comprehension and recall of new content area material. Subjects were randomly assigned to…

Intended as a resource to help mathematics teachers better understand how reading difficulties can affect student math performance, this annotated bibliography contains approximately 75 entries. The entries are arranged into the following categories: (1) reading skills needed in mathematics, (2) mathematical vocabulary and symbols, (3)…

Three suggestions are offered to the teacher of reading: permit the students to read, encourage students to guess or predict, and focus the students' attention on meaning. (JH)

A study examined good and poor readers' inferencing strategies as they read unambiguous texts. Subjects, 42 fifth-grade students from 11 classrooms in a Boston metropolitan area urban school district, read 2 well-constructed mystery stories divided into 6 episodes--each episode ended with the introduction of a new clue related to solving the case.…

The definitions of and literature on test speededness are reviewed, and factors and areas in which the tests reveal their strengths and limitations are discussed. The focus of this article is on speeded reading comprehension tests used for entry or re-entry placement in postsecondary institutions. Speeded tests were prompted by the accelerating…

The 1987-88 Compensatory Language Experiences and Reading-Recovery (CLEAR-RR) Program of the Columbus, Ohio Public Schools was implemented to provide early intervention to 393 underachieving first-grade pupils in Columbus, Ohio schools who appeared unlikely to learn to read successfully without intensive instruction. The program's two major goals…

Intended to help teachers, researchers, curriculum developers, and administrators develop improved policy in reading instruction and research, this book challenges several widespread assumptions about effective reading instruction and concludes with 20 policy guidelines which can be used to evaluate existing reading programs and redesign them to…

To assess the reading achievement of American school children, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) surveyed nationally representative samples of approximately 13,000 students at grades 4, 8, and 12 attending public and private schools across the nation. Students read a variety of literary and informative passages and then…

Four commercial test preparation programs were evaluated for their effectiveness in increasing scores of elementary school student on standardized multiple-choice tests. Focus was on determining whether: formal training increases students' test-taking skills, students can generalize the test wiseness strategies to improve their scores on…