The National Institute of Education (NIE) Conference on Studies in Reading, held in 1974, featured ten panel discussions, each focusing on a designated topic related to reading. This publication reviews the reports of recommended research and development activities produced by the panels for the following topical areas: semantics, concepts, and culture; the way in which readers extract meaning from texts; attention and motivation; modeling the reading process; assessment of reading comprehension; application of existing reading comprehension research; reading comprehension and the high school graduate; learning and motivation in early reading; reading strategies for different cultural and linguistic groups; and essential skills and skill hierarchies in reading. (GW)