Two experiments examined children's ability to apply three different standards for evaluating their understanding. Five-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-old children were presented with short narrative passages within which were embedded three types of problems (nonsense words, internal inconsistencies, and prior knowledge violations), each of…

To determine the frequency of simple main ideas (explicit statements found in a single T-unit), delayed completion main ideas (explicit statements using no more than two T-units), and inferred main ideas in social studies textbooks, 100 passages from second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grade textbooks were analyzed. Results of the study revealed…

A study investigated the development of metacognitive strategy instruction on standardized reading comprehension measures with fourth grade students. Forty-one subjects were assigned to one of three criterion reading groups, based on pretest scores using the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test (SDRT) and the Wide Range Achievement Test: (1)…

A study examined whether the reading comprehension of students with rich domain-specific knowledge will be better than that of students without it and whether assessed general skills will be correlated significantly with reading comprehension performance for students without specific knowledge, but negligible for the students with much specific…

Contrasts between children's visualization and understanding of a filmed story and of a story in print are drawn in the introduction of this symposium paper. Discussion then briefly focuses on variables related to studying effects of story pictures on viewers, such as the story-line, audience characteristics, and the coordination of story modality…

A study investigated children's ability to distinguish among literal, metaphorical, and anomalous comparisons. The 100 subjects, equal numbers of three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children and college students, completed similarity statements by choosing one of two words from (1) a metaphorical/literal word pair, (2) a literal/anomalous word…

While stimulus-response theories of learning maintain the reality and importance of the stimulus outside the perception of the person, a cognitive-field learning theory insists that, in order to make meaning, a person must perceive and react with the stimulus. Holding to this or any learning model has implications for the following: a definition…

F. C. Bartlett's concept of "attitude" is used in this paper as a point of departure for the creation of a model of the complementary functioning of discursive and experiential memorial representation. The paper first discusses several of the memorial functions of experiential representation, in particular the integrative function…

Prereading teaching strategies that help students connect schemata in their head with the information on the page are important components of reading instruction. Three prereading strategies that serve the purpose of stimulating linking activity are posing related questions, presenting reaction statements, and introducing concept stimuli. Related…

In a study investigating the nature of questioning, a group of subjects with little relevant knowledge and a group with a great deal of relevant knowledge were asked to prepare a chocolate mousse. During the preparation, the subjects were allowed to ask any number of questions and each was answered immediately. Results showed that the number of…

Contending that previous investigations into the efficacy of underlining as a study technique have yielded mixed results due to the specific experimental methodologies employed, a study addressed the issue by manipulating both the reading comprehension skills of students and the kind of information given to them about underlining. Specifically,…

Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

This report describes four experiments on various aspects of memory for connected discourse. The first experiment dealt with preexperimental dispositions to respond to sentences and showed that people do come to experiments with biases; therefore, control of materials is necessary in this research area. The second experiment studied the…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

An experimental context designed to directly affect discourse processing by inducing subjects to generate inferences involving text content was compared to a context in which subjects simply listened to and recalled the content of a text. Context did effect the amount of inferred and overgeneralized semantic information in subjects' text recalls.…