To observe the relationship of auditory and visual receptive skills to achievement in reading, 80 eight-year-old children were given a diagnostic test battery which examined three receptive skills--attention to stimuli, discrimination, and memory--within three sensory modalities--auditory, visual, and auditory-visual. The control group consisted…

A study was conducted to examine the hypothesis that the distracting nature of incidental information inherent to television news, combined with the absence of headlines, might result in television viewers remembering less central and more incidental information than they would when reading a newspaper article that uses headlines to condense the…

More than 1,500 high school foreign language students were tested for comprehension of authentic texts. First- through fifth-year French, German, and Spanish students read texts of the types mentioned in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines at the intermediate and intermediate high levels. All students captured some meaning from each of the texts.…

Elementary school children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Results indicated that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated.…

Two studies with 170 third-, 303 fifth-, and 288 seventh-graders in Heidelberg (West Germany) compared memory performance and text comprehension of groups equivalent on domain-specific knowledge of the game of soccer but differing in overall aptitude. Whether prior knowledge or overall aptitude level was more important in acquiring/using new…

Fifty-six field-dependent and 55 field-independent students in grades 6 through 8 were assessed on reading comprehension tasks varying in memory load and cognitive restructuring requirements. Field-independent readers outperformed field-dependent readers on tasks with high memory demands and requirements for efficient restructuring. (SLD)

We examined underlying mechanisms for comprehension differences across expository and narrative text while controlling for factors confounded in the extant literature. Fourth grade students (n=32) read both an expository and a narrative text, and completed both a local comprehension assessment, and a global retelling assessment for each text.…

A group of Israeli high school students (h = 11) from two socially distinct schools read aloud a textbook account of a 1920 bloody encounter between Jews and Arabs. The study aimed at examining the relation between the textbook account and the students' formation of historical perceptions. Prior to reading the textbook excerpts, students wrote…

This study involved fourth grade children as co-researchers of their engaged, aesthetic reading experience. As members of the "Readers as Researchers Club," they documented their engagement with text--how they create, enter, and sustain the story world. The children, who self-identified as avid readers, explored the activities central to their…

This study explored the enhancement of comprehension of expository text by three specific types of embedded explication--etymological, causal, and analogical--together with momentum effects from sequencing. Four factors were examined: (1) the experimental effects of presenting the section of the script containing explications of new terms before…

This student workbook contains instructional units dealing with developing reading, writing, and listening skills and using a newspaper. Addressed in the unit on reading and writing skills are finding main ideas; mastering reading attack skills; improving memory skills; learning words from context; skimming; developing vocabulary; improving study…

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 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects on reading comprehension of a number of reader-related factors, including lookback during studying, oral versus silent reading modes, reading…

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…

Discusses the "fill-in" test, explains how to construct it, and gives statistical evidence for its effectiveness in testing English as a foreign language reading comprehension. In addition, a comparison is made between this test and the more conventional multiple-choice and cloze tests, citing the advantages and disadvantages of each.…