A study was conducted to construct measures of reading competencies that are frequently needed in an occupational environment and to describe the influence of the components of reading practice on these competencies based on the conceptual framework of ethnographic psychology. The reading practices of 25 electrical engineers and 30 electronic…

Cognitive research of the 1970s has shown that both content factors (topical world knowledge and knowledge about textual organization) and process factors (attention, encoding, inference, retrieval, and executive monitoring) influence comprehension. Classroom research during the same decade has shown that the greater the proportion of time…

Students (N=49) enrolled in a physics course for elementary teachers were evaluated for their abilities to use: (1) combinatorial logic; (2) separation and control of variables; (3) proportional reasoning; and (4) reciprocal implications. Performance of four Piagetian tasks during interviews was treated as a measure of the degree to which students…

This study compares the validity of three cloze procedures (traditional, limited, and least-major-constituent limited) when reading comprehension is defined as cognitive change. Over 400 seventh and eighth graders from public schools in North Carolina and Arizona were randomly assigned to one of the three cloze formats for either fiction or…

In a study that investigated differences in the processing styles of beginning readers, a Pictograph Sentence Memory Test (PSMT) was administered to first and second grade students to determine their processing style as well as to assess instructional effects. Based on their responses to the PSMT, the children were classified as either visual or…

The "yes/no" method of vocabulary assessment requires students to indicate words they know from among a list of words and nonwords. Preliminary evidence gained from a study involving fifth grade students indicates that the method is superior in many ways to the multiple choice method of assessment. Analysis of "false alarms," cases in which…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

The task of unscrambling and reordering the sentences for six stories was completed by 455 third, sixth, and ninth grade students from three cultural groups (black, Anglo, and Hispanic) in a study of how sociocultural differences in story schemata affect reading comprehension. The results showed that the greatest effects were for grade level and…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

A total of 224 subjects participated in a study to determine how children and adults comprehend logical connectives. Specifically, the study examined the effects of age, content, and practice on the encoding and combination of logical relationships expressed by six types of logical connectives: conjunction, disjunction, conditionality,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) reading comprehension and visual creativity; (2) family interaction and reading achievement in high school males; (3) conceptual tempo, Piagetian level of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teaching strategies for reading comprehension; (2) strategies for assigning meaning to unfamiliar words in context; (3) differential processing of explicit and…

Ability to reason clearly and efficiently is perhaps the single most important learning objective common to all subjects and to all aspects of the schooling situation. In order to design an effective reading comprehension program, teachers and program planners must assess children's logical abilities. This discussion provides a review of some of…

This introduction to the pedagogy of reading comprehension in a second language focuses on learning strategies appropriate to achieving reading competence. Lexical strategies can be fostered by tolerating local errors and encouraging practice in the identification of specific features such as tense, part of speech, and cognation. Tasks that…