A study was conducted to identify the contributions of both prior knowledge and prereading vocabulary instruction to passage comprehension. In addition, semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis--instructional strategies that build upon students' prior knowledge--were compared with a modified basal approach for effectiveness as prereading…

This study investigated the effectiveness of teaching specific rather than global comprehension skills; the correlations among sex, intelligence level, and comprehension gain when taught global or specific comprehension skills; and the correlations between the factors of intelligence, comprehension, and vocabulary without regard for the teaching…

A study was conducted to see whether the people of Burundi would learn English more efficiently if it were presented through the people's native language, Kirundi, rather than through French. Five components were determined for the experiment: lexicon, structure, conversation, pronunciation, and spelling. A survey of 23 advanced students in a…

A six-year-long study investigated the reading instructional strategies used by elementary school teachers and identified those strategies used by effective and less effective teachers. At two-year intervals, all third and sixth grade teachers who taught reading in self-contained classrooms were classified as high, average, or low effective…

The purpose of the investigation was to develop and test an audio-tutorial program for a course in Basic Reference. The design of the investigation was a posttest-only-control group design with 63 students randomly assigned to either an audio-tutorial or a lecture group. Data were collected and analyzed using a t-test for two groups and four…

The paper investigated the relationship between how people reason about moral matters and how they act. Moral reasoning is defined as degree of maturity of judgment relating to moral matters. Moral behavior is interpreted to include behaving in ways which are helpful to others in need or distress and refraining from behavior which is physically or…

A series of three experiments obtained objective measures of skilled and unskilled writing that was prepared in response to a potentially hostile audience. The principal differences between the two groups of writers were that skilled writers were far more likely than unskilled writers to go beyond the narrow constraints of the task, to generate…

AN INVESTIGATION TO DETERMINE IF INSTRUCTION IN VARIANT WORD ENDINGS CAN BE GIVEN IN THE SECOND SEMESTER OF THE FIRST GRADE IS DESCRIBED. TWENTY-SIX FIRST-GRADE CLASSES (554 CHILDREN) FROM THE ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM WERE USED IN THE STUDY. THE CLASSES WERE DIVIDED INTO TWO GROUPS OF 13 CLASSES EQUATED ON SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL,…

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO METHODS OF FIRST-GRADE BEGINNING READING INSTRUCTION WERE INVESTIGATED. APPROXIMATELY 920 FIRST-GRADE CHILDREN WERE DIVIDED INTO 2 GROUPS WHICH RECEIVED 1 OF THE 2 METHODS. TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN VARIABLES ON READING ACHIEVEMENT, THE CHILDREN WERE MATCHED IN PAIRS. THE RESULTS WERE GATHERED FROM ONE GROUP…

The effects of sentence combining instruction on student writing skills (punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and syntactic maturity) and reading achievement were studied in eight-, nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children. The experimental group, which received instruction in sentence combining, consisted of 20 students from each age group.…

Twenty-eight composition teachers at a large university, a two-year college, and an engineering college, all of whom had taught composition through both the tutorial method and typical classroom methods, were interviewed regarding advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. Among the advantages of tutorials mentioned were the chance to…

Investigated was the effect of different types of laboratory reports on measured outcomes of the Chemical Education Materials Study (CHEMS) Chemistry. Compared were procedures using essay laboratory reports, mimeographed laboratory sheets prepared by the investigator and completed by the students, the laboratory manual for the course completed by…

A pilot study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of five curricular methods used in a summer Head Start program designed to develop perceptual-motor skills. Three hundred and seventy-three inner-city children in 15 Head Start centers were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Brenner Developmental Gestalt Test of School…

In order to determine the reasons for attrition in individualized courses, completion rates and instructional styles for an individualized communications skills course were examined, beginning with a class group in fall 1969 where 80.55% completed the course and continuing with an open lab concept through winter, spring, and summer 1970, when…

The commonly-used instructional sequence in which children read material silently and then read it orally is simply not effective. The arguments presented by E.A. Betts in 1957 for silent before oral reading can be countered point by point. Studies that have compared various reading conditions have had serious limitations and have failed to show…