Reflecting the concerns of researchers and practitioners about children's text comprehension, this book defines and provides examples of narrative and expository text and describes research-based strategies for helping children comprehend these two types of text. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "Research on Stories: Implications…

A pilot study was conducted to contrast children's comprehension of inside view (where writers share the inner thoughts of characters with readers) and character plans in an original story and its basal reader adaptation prior to and following participation in a reading conference focused upon these aspects of character. Subjects were 12 students…

High school students (N=213) of various ability levels enrolled in first-year algebra classes were presented lessons concerning geometry concepts. The lessons were varied according to the degree of complexity of the examples that were presented. Students then were tested over their understanding of the concepts. The test questions ranged from…

A fundamental assumption in some recently developed language teaching methodologies is that there should be a silent period at the beginning of second language instruction during which students do not speak the target language but develop and demonstrate comprehension in other ways. A number of studies and experiments have attempted to illustrate…

"Inquiry Training," a teaching technique promoted during the 1960s, involves students gathering information about a discrepant event or puzzling situation, and formulating theories to explain the event. Continuing the work of two studies into the efficacy of Inquiry Training (subsequently renamed Cognition Enhancement), a more refined…

Noting that both comprehension and decoding are used by effective readers and that both processes should be taught, this concept paper focuses on effective strategies for reading instruction. Following an introduction, the first section focuses on the conclusions drawn about word identification by reading researchers. Subsections include…

This study examines the relationship between student misconceptions and learning by focusing on six fifth-grade students as they attempt to make sense of classroom instruction on light and seeing. Pretests, posttests, and classroom observation narratives served as student data. Pretests indicate that students held the misconception that sight is…

A study was conducted to determine if visualization could be used as an organizational tool to help adult education students improve their reading comprehension by helping them to see the structure of what they are reading in a sort of verbal picture of organized ideas. Following a review of research, which identified five areas in which…

These conference proceedings report on and review the Learning from Text Project activities that started in the fall of 1980, and by the end of the second year had expanded to three University of California (UC) and six California State University (CSU) campuses. Following a summary of the conference proceedings, an introduction describes the…

Idea-mapping (i-mapping), a way of representing ideas from a text in the form of a diagram, is defined and illustrated in this document as a way to help students "see" how the ideas they read are linked to each other. The first portion of the document discusses the fundamental relationships found in texts (A is a characteristic of B, A…

Noting that good reading comprehension is aided by the reader's attention to text organization, this paper presents a rationale and method for teaching students to map content materials. The paper begins by noting research demonstrating that good comprehenders attend to text organization. It then briefly reviews research related to the impact on…

This paper describes Directed Activities Related to Text (DART), procedures that were developed and are used in the Reading for Learning Project at the University of Nottingham (England) to enhance learning from texts and that fall into two broad categories: (1) text analysis procedures, which require students to engage in some form of analysis of…

This paper suggests that by emphasizing word identification skills and oral reading and by using limited reading materials, teachers have neglected reading for meaning. Following a review of current instructional practices, the paper explains how understanding writing depends on the world experience, language knowledge, and processing strategies…

To determine the effects of active student-initiated response lessons as an alternative to teacher-directed strategies for increasing reading comprehension, third grade children were placed into either an experimental or a control group. The experimental group received a series of lessons based on active student-initiated responses. These included…

The process of acquiring knowledge from texts is considered from two perspectives: the learning of the individual facts in the text, and the integration of the facts into a coherent representation reflecting relations among the facts. The former process is presumed to depend on the linguistics content of the text, while the latter process depends…