This reading inventory was constructed from vocabulary lists and stories in Lippincott's Basic Reading Series (1971 edition). Designed to yield an estimate of a child's instructional reading level for grades one through eight, this program comprises reading selections and tests which are individually administered and to which students respond…

The papers in this volume were initially presented at a seminar on the development of reading comprehension, which explored basic research and the teaching of reading comprehenison. Researchers in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and experts in curriculum design in reading gave presentations and reacted to one another's ideas. Each…

After considering various estimates of the extent to which there is a "literacy problem" in the United States, this paper develops an econometric model of the literacy program. Defining the volume of literacy as the total amount of information that people exchange through the materials they want or need to use, the volume of literacy is seen to be…

Results suggested that auditory-visual integration ability in this sample was developmental; however, the subjects functioned at a lower level than would be expected of middle-class students. The effects of grade level, sex differences, Intelligence Quotient, and single-modality auditory and visual functioning were examined as possible moderating…

Basic skills training in the United States Navy has become increasingly important as the quality of the recruit population has declined and the job demands faced by enlisted personnel have expanded. A study investigated reading comprehension and related variables pertaining to the Navy's recruits during a 12-month period. The primary focus of the…

This paper provides information on the use of referential communication tasks (tasks that structure speaking and listening behaviors so that participants need to interact to achieve accurate comprehension) in evaluating students' comprehension and listening skills. An introduction discusses interactive listening and the referential communication…

In the ninth season of the television program, "Sesame Street," new pre-reading and pre-science segments were introduced to the show. This report evaluates these segments with regard to young children's visual attention and comprehension. The intent of the evaluation was to assess the effectiveness not only of individual segments but…

A study investigated the effectiveness of using thematic organizers to increase the reading comprehension of poor readers. The thematic organizer was used to expand the readers' prior knowledge by defining the implied thematic concept and presenting relevant examples of that concept. Twenty-four fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who had been…

A promising way to enhance student listening performance with recorded materials is to mechanically retard or advance the speed of the tape and electronically correct the accompanying shift in pitch. With a speech compressor/expander, the language laboratory can eliminate the negative psychological effects of too much speed. Beginning students…

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…

The application of computer technology to reading research has made it possible to study the perceptual processes that take place as people read with a level of precision never before attainable. This computer assisted research has revealed that where the eyes go for fixations is of significance to normal reading and that during each fixation only…

A study investigated the effect of Frank O'Hare's "Sentencecraft" sentence combining program on the written syntactic skills, reading comprehension level, and speed of average ability ninth-grade students. The sample consisted of 75 experimental group students and 68 control group students. Following a pretest, the experimental group…

For many White Mountain Apache children, their first contact with the English language occurs in Head Start and day care programs, thus forcing them to learn to read and write a language they seldom use. This situation led the tribe to develop an Apache bilingual/bicultural program in which an orthography based on the letters of the English…

Two levels of stimulus condition were used to determine whether or not the amount of salient information contained in the perceptual stimuli accompanying orally presented "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how and why) facilitates children's comprehension. Conditions varied in terms of the number of…

Professional discourse among educators often includes the use of "slogans" and "generalizations." Generalizations are usually more precise than slogans, which can be interpreted differently and to various degrees. During the implementation of open education curricula in several elementary schools, the evolution of teachers'…