Suggests that self-reported story climax imagery is related to deeper levels of processing on reading comprehension measures that do not rely disproportionately on verbal reasoning processes. (AEA)

Concludes that on an immediate recall test, fourth-grade students taught with a graphic organizer strategy for facilitating comprehension recalled significantly more idea units in a test passage than did students who had not received such instruction, but there were no performance differences between the two groups on a one-month delayed recall…

Researchers measured how much thinking time teachers allowed third grade readers of various ability levels when responding to questions. Teachers allowed more time for thinking after text-based questions, although scriptal questions usually required higher-level thinking and, consequently, more time. (Author/PP)

This book brings a philosophical perspective to the topic of children's thinking. It attempts to answer the questions of what it is to think and understand, and how children do so. The book provides an introduction to the philosophy of education as it relates to children's understanding, and is careful not to assume any previous philosophical…

This paper further develops an instructional method called here "process-object linking and embedding". The idea is to link the familiar mathematical processes to objects in a familiar situation, then re-embed the new link through mathematical symbols into their mathematical construction. It makes use of children's extra-mathematical,…

Reviews three alternative cognitive approaches for verbal comprehension. Discusses a theory of learning from context and cites empirical data to support the theory. Presents a componential framework for understanding verbal comprehension and suggests that the ability to acquire information from context is a key source of individual differences in…

A mature understanding of the natural world requires experiential learning. Significant experience provides a constant source of values and understanding. Experiential learning is a holistic process, where conceptual, linguistic and perceptual elements are blended with direct impressions of the environment. Experiential knowing is not fixed but is…

Indicates that college students make use of word length and shape information to decode text and that the context of a passage affects students' knowledge of the syntactic structure and semantic content of that passage. (AEA)

Explains how education majors try to learn to recognize thought unit sentences (ThUS's) and to gauge their difficulty. Shows examples of simple writing and discusses the task of writing ThUS's to match style and level of author. Gives a rationale for doing a readability analysis in this way. (FL)

The construct validity of reading comprehension test items was studied in a two-stage process. Five characteristics of task difficulty were defined and a heterogeneous set of 52 items were rated for these characteristics. Then correlations were obtained between ratings and item difficulty data. (CTM)

The study examined 120 bilingual Mexican American and 24 monolingual Anglo American (pre-K-1) children's comprehension of 26 relational concepts by manipulating the natural language to separate and evaluate cognitive and linguistic variables. Six hypotheses were proposed as operating principles applicable to, but not necessarily limited to,…

Argues that television, when used as a secondary activity, interferes with performance on otherwise intellectually demanding tasks. Examines performance on seven different cognitive processing tests for respondents in four television-viewing conditions and a no-TV control group. Finds significant performance decrements for measures of reading…

Discussion of the integration of school library media programs into the curriculum highlights comprehension and inference generation as links between human information processing and subject area methodology. Long-term and short-term memory are discussed, and instruction in inference using narrative fiction is explained. (15 references) (LRW)

Reports on a study that focused on the mental processes second-language learners use in listening comprehension, the strategies they use in different phases of comprehension, and the differences in strategy use between students designated by their teachers as effective and ineffective listeners. Findings are related to implications for…