As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

Describes how to construct behavioral objectives based upon psycholinguistic reading processes. (MKM)

Explores the central assumption of the cloze procedure, which is that context can be used inferentially to predict deleted words. (MKM)

Inaugurates this column's topic for the year: document strategy procedures and ways to teach them. Argues that knowledge of document structures allows for better knowledge of the cognitive steps and metacognitive strategies in document processing. (SR)

Reading comprehension includes both how much a reader remembers and how well the reader understands what has been read. It is dependent upon processing meaning. A model for how this is done includes three steps: identifying important elements of the text, constructing representations of important text information, and matching the representations…

School age children and adults read short paragraphs suggesting spatial relationships and were given a recognition test containing items congruent with the semantic content of the test. Subjects recognized the semantically congruent inferences as having been present in the original reading material. (AA)

Describes the reading in sign language of 25 stories by four young deaf readers. Suggests that the reading processes of the deaf closely resemble those of hearing readers. (AEA)

A reader's ability to recognize an author's top-level structure in a passage is a useful strategy for organizing textual information for memory purposes. Even without specialized training, many adults and some fifth grade children have this ability. Other children in fifth and ninth grades, and in classes for the mildly mentally handicapped, have…

Deaf elementary and secondary students were found to be less skilled when reading stories in "elaboration" (i.e., drawing conclusions through interpretation of details), a process requiring higher-order thinking skills. An approach to teaching these skills is described that compares and contrasts a series of stories sharing a common theme. (VW)

Reviews work in the connection between imagery and reading that has taken place recently in order to discover productive classroom practices aid reading comprehension. (FL)

Research into the reading process has shaped an understanding of how readers "make meaning" when they are engaged in a reading activity. This research has highlighted a learning triad--the reader, the text, and the context (or learning environment)--that interactively affects the manner in which the student will comprehend a particular…

A group of 50 third garde, 51 sixth grade, and 52 eleventh grade students participated in a study to examine the extent to which good readers at three grade levels expected structures in stories, the nature of their expectations, and developmental similarities and differences in their structural expectations. Materials for the study were prepared…

This paper is intended as an introduction to the concept of comprehension monitoring, which is an important component of reading and involves evaluating and regulating one's ongoing comprehension processes. A discussion of research that investigated comprehension monitoring with both children and adults is presented and the implications for…

Describes a procedure for helping students understand and work mathematical word problems. (MKM)

Explains how changes in reading theory have meant new emphases and new ways to teaching reading. (JL)