Indicates that including philosophical skills in the reading program of fifth-grade students led to improved reading comprehension achievement for both above and below average readers. (FL)

Twenty-four college seniors summarized a 167-word text. Five days later, they completed a sentence-recognition task and described components of successful text summarization. It appeared that students who summarized efficiently also stored information in memory efficiently. (Author/CJ)

Good and poor comprehenders from grades four, six, and eight were directed to process one of two narratives in which major informational inconsistencies were noted. Younger readers and poorer comprehenders required more attentional assistance to note the inconsistencies. (FL)

Reports on a study that was designed to determine the differential holes that three variables--accessing word meaning, integrating prior knowledge, and using text structure to organize ideas--play, not only in comprehension, but also in metacomprehension. (HOD)

Four levels of notetaking (summary, paraphrase, verbatim, and letter search) were used to control depth of processing of a prose passage with high school students, who then either reviewed their notes or read an interpolated text. Results favored groups with deeper levels of processing on two post-tests. (Author/RD)

A study found that a particular study skill system (mapping or paraphrasing) did not benefit one kind of learner (field dependent or field independent) more than another. (MKM)

Delineates five developmental listening comprehension stages second language learners pass through: (1) streams of sound, with no comprehension; (2) word recognition within the stream; (3) phrase/formula recognition; (4) clause/sentence recognition; and (5) extended speech recognition, or general comprehension. The discussion illustrates the…

This discussion centers around the dangers in making too precise a particular concept in educational psychology that distinguishes between two types of understanding, instrumental and relational. (MP)

A target paragraph was embedded in one passage where the target was of major importance, and one where it was of minor importance. Free recall, reading time, and usage of cognitive capacity were measured. There was greater recall when the target was important. The selective-attention hypothesis was not supported. (Author/GDC)

Two experiments demonstrated that third and sixth graders consistently selected certain strategies for solving old and new, empirical and value, contradictory information. Subjects were 320 children. (MP)

A visual search task was used to investigate the development of word processing skills used in reading meaningful text, and to evaluate the relative difficulty of employing different types of units. Subjects were 20 second graders, 19 fourth graders, and 20 college students. (MP)

In studying the effects of different teaching methods on preschoolers' language abilities it was found that the productive training condition produced more generalized responding on other kinds of tasks. (Editor)

To broaden and develop reasoning powers in students the teacher should encourage observation, critical questioning of hypotheses, evaluation of conclusions and how they are reached, and propose new avenues of approach to problems. (JD)

Charts the process by which, over some 10 years, one reader came to read a particular text "with full understanding." Indicates how crucial in that process were the complex, interacting influences of other, simpler literary texts, of the reader's own life experience, and (paradoxically) of "family" experience not consciously…

Studied the cognitive equivalence of computerized and paper-and-pencil reading comprehension tests using verbal protocol analysis. Results for 48 college students indicate that the only significant difference between the computerized and paper-and-pencil tests was in the frequency of identifying important information in the passage. (SLD)