Suggests that critical reading and reading comprehension be taught separately at first to insure that students learn both to understand and to evaluate pieces of writing. (MKM)

Children need to learn early that reading can give them new ideas and change old ideas. Pupils are all too often evaluated in terms of their ability to express what they know rather than what they think. Thoughtful reading can be done from the very beginning of reading instruction. Effective questioning practices will develop this ability. The…

Discusses guided reading as an approach that teachers can use to help young students better comprehend what they are reading. Notes that guided reading allows teachers to talk, think, and read through a text with children, offering questions, comments, and prompts to the children to stimulate their interest and understanding. (MDM)

This study discusses the importance of comprehension in reading and describes a tool for measuring reading comprehension according to an individual reader's "structures of meaning." The procedure for developing a visual representation of this structure involves three distinct steps. After reading the text, student and teacher employ techniques,…

Comprehension levels necessary to the acquisition and retention of facts, concepts, and rules and the facilitating effects of the use of orienting directions and postadjunct questions were investigated in a study involving 105 sixth-grade students. Four treatment groups each received a version of a six-page fictional passage, differing in the use…

Because students are highly motivated to read texts online rather than in traditional form, McNabb argues, schools should encourage students to use the Internet for academic and pleasure reading. However, hypertext has unique features that make comprehension monitoring while reading challenging. Strategies that work for reading passages of printed…

The incidental learning effects of discrimination which would be required in searching for and selecting related information in a text were explored. Sixty-one students from three educational psychology classes at Fairleigh-Dickinson University participated. Subjects were randomly assigned to four experimental groups and were given reading search…

The process of interrupting the reading of a text in order to predict what is to come is a well-established reading instructional technique known as Directed Reading/Thinking Activities (DRTA). Predictive intervention, a classroom structure based on this technique, is more frequently productive of creative revision than either teacher advice or…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of various models constructed to account for how children read and comprehended a story presented in a directed reading lesson. A commercial directed reading lesson was revised to introduce information related to the story and to help the children form a "map" of the central story content. Data were…

Ideas to be understood and to be remembered must be organized. To organize ideas the reader must recognize the relationship of the parts of the ideas, to one another and to the whole. The reader with no orderly set of the ideas presented on the printed page cannot carry on a dialogue with the author and profit from the reading experience. What did…

A four-week course in reading comprehension which attempts to provide students with a repertoire of techniques to use when they encounter difficult reading passages is described in this paper. At the end of the course, students must demonstrate their ability to skim a short reading passage and write a one-sentence summary of its central theme and…

Outlines instructional implications of a theory of reading comprehension that holds that a transaction takes place between reader and text during which the reader derives meaning from printed marks based on personal experiences. (AEA)

After an informal study of 589 college freshmen enrolled in reading courses at Bishop State Junior College (Alabama) revealed that most students read out-of-class assignments only sometimes because of the degree of difficulty of the reading tasks, a series of directed and structured activities was developed to promote reading comprehension. The…

By providing definitions of key concepts, outlines of major models, and practical suggestions for classroom implementation, this pamphlet gives teachers access to current research on the interactive model of reading. The topics covered include: Vygotsky's learning theory, metacomprehension, prior knowledge, chapter mapping, cooperative learning,…

Secondary and postsecondary students who use the read-answer-discuss strategy while studying read ineffectively and do not comprehend or retain main ideas. A study examined the effectiveness of (1) the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, (2) conceptual mapping, (3) a combination of those strategies, and (4) reading and underlining main ideas as…