Stresses the importance of careful diagnosis for each child, concluding that by working with such related skills as listening comprehension, spatial relations, and auditory association the overall effectiveness of a reading program for spanish-speaking children may be increased significantly. (RB)

Investigates the influence that instruction and the developmental stage of learning to read have on the reading concepts of first graders from skill-based and literature-based classrooms. Finds both groups exhibited high interest in learning and knowing words but that the literature group differed in their heightened metacognitive understandings,…

Investigation of the effect of establishing purposes for reading upon reading comprehension showed that neither specific nor general reading directions appeared to affect performance and that purpose-setting directions served to discriminate between intentional and incidental information only for above-grade-level readers.

Reports on a content analysis of four popular first-grade basal series, examining decoding and comprehension instruction in teachers' manuals, student texts, workbooks, and supplementary activity packages. Reports that none of the programs present a balanced approach to teaching decoding and comprehension with very comprehensible stories. (MM)

Suggests the extent and manner in which the word characteristics of materials may be separated from and contribute to the strategies children develop for word identification. (RB)

Confirmed the hypothesis that those in the three-dimensional instructional group would make fewer confusion errors that those in the two-dimensional instructional group on a transfer task in reading. (RB)

Discusses research which compared the performance of children with reading disabilities to the performance of normal readers, matched for age and reading level, in a backward-masking letter-identification and localization task. (JM)

Concludes that sixth-grade students taught with methods that used a structured overview to activate background knowledge, the cloze procedure to develop an inferential thinking strategy, and a self-monitoring checklist to maintain the strategy increased their inferential comprehension skills as measured by both immediate and delayed transfer…

Investigates the effectiveness of instruction in story mapping as a means to promote first-grade students' comprehension of central story elements in children's literature. Concludes that instruction in story mapping is an effective instructional strategy for promoting first-grade students' ability to identify central narrative elements in…

Determines how science and social studies textbooks were used by teachers and students in 12 fourth grade lessons and what kinds of questions the teachers asked during the lessons. Finds that students do not get much practice reading informational text, and instruction often fails to promote conceptual understanding and meaningful learning from…

Presents the results of a study designed to determine whether idioms cause difficulty for students in the reading and understanding of prose, concluding that methods of teaching idioms should be explored. (RB)

Describes Simuread, a computer program which is designed to aid in reading instruction, and illustrates its research applications. (RB)