Three treatment groups were used to examine the effects on general reading comprehension of teaching and testing four subskills related to the identification of the main idea in prose materials. Subjects were 157 tenth-grade students. Besides a control group, two experimental approaches were used, consisting of subjects who were both taught four…

The purpose of this teaching unit is to improve the reading skills of fifth grade students, particularly reading comprehension, by increasing their knowledge about how language works. The three sections of the unit introduce the students to the concepts of context clues and paraphrasing (words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories) and give the…

A city-wide elementary school reading program that emphasizes mastery learning and continuous progress in Chicago, Continuous Progress--Mastery Learning, is blamed for the declining reading test scores of high school students there. The program's origins and evolution are described along with a new program, Chicago Mastery Learning Reading, which…

B. S. Bloom's theory of school learning states that three independent variables account for most of the variation in students' achievement: cognitive entry behaviors (CEB), affective entry characteristics, and the quality of instruction. These variables determine the nature of learning outcomes--level and type of achievement, rate of learning, and…