The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda encourage educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to focus on preparing students for life after high school. A key emphasis is literacy, as the ability to read and comprehend written language is critical to success in college and careers.…

Across three experiments involving four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the same pattern of ability to sequence events was found: familiar events in forward order were the easiest to sequence, then unfamiliar events in forward order, familiar events in backward order, and finally unfamiliar events in backward order. (Author/RH)

The investigation compared the transparency of 11 different types of symbols with 40 nonspeaking mentally retarded subjects (ages 4-20). Analysis indicated a hierarchy of difficulty with actual objects the easiest and Blissymbols and written words the hardest to understand. Results have implications for selecting initial symbol systems for…

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

This study examined the ability of 30 adults with mild or moderate mental retardation to monitor their comprehension while performing a direction-following task. The 60 directions included 6 with trouble sources (ambiguous directions, unintelligible words, and compliance problems). Ability to monitor comprehension varied with type of trouble…

Analysis of young children's comprehension of common idioms revealed a significant linear trend for children to make more literal responses with increasing age. Children did not find the story contexts helpful in interpreting the idioms. A range of comprehension scores was found among the individual idioms, but semantic transparency was not…

To explore whether different balances of fiction/non-fiction reading and challenge might help explain differences in reading achievement between genders, data on 45,670 pupils who independently read over 3 million books were analysed. Moderate (rather than high or low) levels of challenge were positively associated with achievement gain, but…

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

This study assessed the effects of curriculum on technical features (criterion validity and developmental growth rates) within curriculum-based measurement in reading with 91 elementary level handicapped and nonhandicapped students. Correlations between oral reading samples and reading comprehension as well as developmental growth rates were…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…

The comparative translucency within and across 5 aided augmentative and alternative symbol systems for symbols representing 3 parts of speech (nouns, verbs, and modifiers) was investigated with 50 college undergraduates. Results indicated that translucency varies among systems or sets and among parts of speech. (Author/DB)

This study examined effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty on spoken-word recognition among native and non-native listeners with either normal or impaired hearing. Non-native listeners required greater intensity for equal intelligibility than native listeners. Significant effects of talker variability and lexical difficulty were…

Two linguistic microstructures (propositions and cohesive devices) were analyzed in story recalls by 11 primary and intermediate level hearing-impaired students. When stories were very simple, students generated mostly complete propositions, however as complexity increased, semantic errors resulted in fewer complete propositions. (Author/DB)

This study examined characteristics of multiple-choice reading comprehension tasks suspected of influencing their difficulty, through administration of the California Achievement Tests to 158 deaf college students. Problem components evaluated included manifest content, psychologically salient features, and processing demands. Variation in item…

Twenty-two classroom teachers (grades one through seven) of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities were interviewed concerning their use of social studies textbooks. Results indicated that teachers were concerned about content and comprehensibility of the texts. Teachers reported dealing with difficult texts by helping individuals with…