Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) creativity as a mediating variable in inferential reading comprehension; (2) teacher questioning and student response interaction during portions of reading comprehension lessons; (3) filtering and construction processes in the comprehension of text; (4) sequential memory abilities and reading achievement; (5) the effect of organizational pattern on comprehension; (6) the relationship of elaboration, organization, and speed of processing to text comprehension differences; (7) problems with masculine generics; (8) effects of prior knowledge and concept-building on good and poor readers' comprehension; (9)concrete-to-abstract instructional progression, readiness, and language patterns; (10) students' concepts of reading and their achievement in reading comprehension; (11) first grade students' understanding of reading terminology; (12) the contribution of prior knowledge, vividness of imagery, academic ability, and "colorfulness" of passage to students' free recall; (13) poor comprehenders' instantiation of oral and written discourse; and (14) effects of mnemonic strategy variations on students' recall. (HOD)

Two studies investigated the role of phonological activation in children's silent reading and listening comprehension. The first study addressed the interaction of reading skill level and phonological sensitivity. Subjects, 32 second-grade students, read eight short passages (four rhymed and four not rhymed) and chose one picture (out of three alternatives) to represent the meaning of the passage. The second study addressed the interaction of grade level and reading skill level with phonological sensitivity. Subjects, 34 kindergarten students and 26 second-grade students, listened to eight short passages (four rhymed and four not rhymed) and chose a picture (from three alternatives) to represent the meaning of the passage. Results of both studies indicated that phonological effects were evidenced in children's reading slowdowns and recall accuracy but not in situational comprehension accuracy as measured by the picture selection task. Children were less able to recall the exact sentences or even the gist of phonologically confusing texts that matched control texts. When recalling phonologically confusing texts, children were prone to make errors in which proper names and pronouns were misrecalled or forgotten, but all other semantic information was recalled correctly. The group of kindergarten less-skilled readers was the only group not to show phonological confusion in verbatim recall but showed phonological confusion in both gist recall and error patterns. Kindergarten children's reading scores and their performance on a standardized test of verbal short-term memory were correlated, suggesting that when memory is overloaded, phonological effects are not apparent in children's verbatim recall, but they are reflected in ability to recall gist. (Five figures of data are included.) (RS)

The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2) "Models of Language Comprehension," (3) "Experimental Psycholinguistics," (4) "Comprehension in Listening and Reading: Same or Different?" (5) "An Interactive Analysis of Oral Reading," (6) "Comprehension of Prose Texts during Reading," (7) "Comprehension Processes in Oral Reading," (8) "Integration of Sentence Meanings in Stories," (9) "Comprehension of Metaphors: Priming the Ground," (10) "An Information Processing Analysis of the Cognitive Processes Involved in Oral Reading," (11) "Reading Comprehension Processes in Polish and English," (12) "A Comparison of Reading Comprehension Processes in Polish and English," and (13) "Memory and Metamemory Processes: Levels of Processing and Cognitive Effort in the Retention of Prose." (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) effects of graphic organizers, textual organization, and reading comprehension level on recall of expository prose; (2) the effect of metaphor on the reading comprehension of sixth grade students; (3) effects of vocabulary difficulty and text characteristics on children's reading comprehension; (4) a self-questioning strategy; (5) third and sixth grade students' comprehension of anaphoric relations in basal readers; (6) oral reading intonation and reading comprehension; (7) the effects of interspersed questions, advance organizers, and post organizers on good and poor comprehenders; (8) age related effects of the interaction of prior knowledge and text structure on the recall of prose; (9) two techniques that elicit predictive responses on the comprehension of content area reading material; (10) a psycholinguistic study of how syntax affects comprehension; (11) the effectiveness of a selected set of study aids on the reading comprehension of fifth and sixth grade students; and (12) the effect of inference-making aids on poor readers' comprehension. (RL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 26 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) individual differences in the use of comprehension strategies; (2) field dependence-independence and text comprehension; (3) automaticity of word identification and reading comprehension; (4) induced visual imagery and literal comprehension; (5) competencies and uses of reading; (6) anaphoric resolution in text comprehension and memory; (7) the use of story concepts during reading; (8) mnemonic encoding strategies for recognition and recall of abstract prose information; (9) six theories on reading; and (10) the use of context clues to derive meanings of unfamiliar words. (MM)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: children's ability to read their own dictated oral language; adjunct structure and reading comprehension; learning and comprehension of simultaneously presented stimuli in children of superior intelligence; literal comprehension as an aspect of total comprehension; the effects of advance and nonorganizers in the learning of verbal materials; the effect of silent and oral reading on comprehension and oral reading miscues; effects of learning instructions and age on information acquired from prose; adult age differences in sentence memory; the effects of restructuring grammatical patterns on comprehension; the effects of expectation modification on reading comprehension; the effects of spatial organization of text on content recall; relationships between semantic and stylistic aspects of language and comprehension of discourse written for children; influences upon learning rate in first grade children exposed to several stressors; and the effects of lexically ambiguous nouns embedded in a reading task for children. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: effects of methods of study, cognitive style, pre-information on the construction of written material, gender of generic pronouns, and study questions interspersed in instructional text material on memory, recall, and retention; effects of metaphor, adjunct aids, passage complexity, word frequency, and syntactic, semantic, and contextual variations on reading comprehension; effects of question type and response mode on learning from prose; the effect of later-appearing syntactic structures on young children's oral reading errors; the ability of textbook cues to influence the reading process; children's use of context clues; the relative effects of reader ability and material difficulty on the size of the perceptual span in reading; the effects of orthographic anomalies on good readers' performance; relationships between art expression and reading strategies; factors influencing college students' learning processes; children's critical reading abilities; and the relationship of mode of story presentation to retention of detail in young children. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teaching strategies for reading comprehension; (2) strategies for assigning meaning to unfamiliar words in context; (3) differential processing of explicit and implicit information; (4) the effect of prose organization on recall; (5) reading and thinking skills of lawyers, law professors, and law students; (6) Zen and the art of reading; (7) the effects of reading purposes on comprehension; (8) a Piagetian model of reading comprehension; (9) the effect of folklore on the reading comprehension and attitudes of the Alaskan adolescent native; (10) psycholinguistic processes in reading; and (11) the effects of underlining and study time on comprehension and recall. (HTH)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teaching strategies for reading comprehension; (2) strategies for assigning meaning to unfamiliar words in context; (3) differential processing of explicit and implicit information; (4) the effect of prose organization on recall; (5) reading and thinking skills of lawyers, law professors, and law students; (6) Zen and the art of reading; (7) the effects of reading purposes on comprehension; (8) a Piagetian model of reading comprehension; (9) the effect of folklore on the reading comprehension and attitudes of the Alaskan adolescent native; (10) psycholinguistic processes in reading; and (11) the effects of underlining and study time on comprehension and recall. (HTH)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationship of text organization to readability and reading ability; how advance organizers, outlining, and other preparatory procedures affect learning and reading comprehension; how syntax and semantics affect the recall of connected discourse; a model of affective and cognitive silent reading strategies; the strategic processes involved in beginning reading; grade level differences in reading comprehension; and differences between recognizing words on a word list and words in context. (RL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's development of syntactic aspects of reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the individual and the text in the comprehension and retention of connected discourse, the relationship between semantic memory retrieval abilities and prose memory outcomes, the perception of shape and letter cues in reading, factors related to the amount of subvocalization exhibited during reading, a mathematical model of word recognition strategies, the effect of prose organization upon recall organization, the resolution of anaphora in written discourse, the relative efficiency of silent and oral reading performance, the effects of oral and written language patterns on comprehension among beginning readers, the context bound effects of picture-text amalgams, the influence of reading ability and mode of presented information on the perception of events, the structure of semantic memory for text, the influence of world knowledge and metacomprehension ability on children's comprehension of short narrative passages, and children's sensitivity to the relative importance of parts of prose. (GT)

Developed and coordinated by the Bureau of Reading Education of the New York State Education Department, Project Alert is a statewide inservice program to facilitate instituting or improving the diagnostic-prescriptive approach to reading instruction. As part of this program, a reading resource kit was prepared by the bureau to give structure and direction to the projects in the local schools. The multimedia kit contains nine packages, each analyzing one skills topic in reading. This seventh package, "Reading Comprehension Related to Thinking Processes," provides teachers with information and activities to improve their competency in the art of questioning. The first section of the package introduces and reviews background information designed to help the teacher set or select objectives for reading comprehension as related to the thinking processes. Section two provides an outline of reading comprehension levels-skills. The third section correlates the skills of reading comprehension with the thinking processes. And section four provides activities and practices for developing question/response techniques. General directions for using the package are provided. (TO)

Chapelle (2003) proposed three general types of input enhancement that help L2 learners "acquire features of the linguistic input that they are exposed to during the course reading or listening for meaning" (p. 40): input salience, input modification, and input elaboration. In 2010, Cárdenas-Claros and Gruba argued that Chapelle's different types of input enhancement "can be and have been operationalized through help options" (p. 79) primarily utilized in the teaching of reading, listening, writing, grammar, and vocabulary such as glossed words, video/audio control features, captions, subtitles, and grammar explanations. As understood from Cárdenas-Claros and Gruba's classification of help options, input enhancement can only be accomplished through one of these processes: salience, modification, or elaboration. In this article, we argue that YouTube comments have the potential to be (1) a help option that facilitates both listening comprehension of the videos and vocabulary learning, and that (2) input enhancement accomplished by comments can be achieved by a combination of different types of input enhancement. Put another way, the aural input of a YouTube video can be salient, modified, and elaborated, thanks to the various types of comments YouTube videos often receive.

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 39 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) oral reading behaviors of early readers; (2) the effects of pictures and mode of presentation on the prose comprehension of third and fifth grade children of varying reading abilities; (3) the effects of improved reading of verb and noun inflectional endings on the reading comprehension of learning disabled students; (4) the effect of message structure on inference making in recall; (5) relationships among concrete and abstract concept development, metacognition, and reading comprehension; (6) hierarchical relationships among the components of the reading abilities of beginning readers; (7) the importance of phrasing to reading comprehension; (8) identification, semantic encoding, and text organization in reading comprehension; (9) the effect of free recall of metaphoric processing in a structured text; (10) the effect of information about sentence referents on children's observational learning of a syntactic rule; and (11) reading processes of skilled older adult readers. (HOD)

A sample consisting of 115 college students participated in a study of the relationships between reading rate, reading comprehension, and related independent variables (attitude, motivation, and interest). A short story was used for obtaining objective rate and comprehension scores for each subject. Two questionnaires designed for the study were used to obtain readers' self reports of their reading processes and attitudes. Contrary to hypotheses, the correlation between rate and comprehension was low (they shared only 7% of the variance), and what readers reported doing in general was related only in a limited way to their specific self reports. As predicted, rate and comprehension were mutually related to attitude, motivation, and interest, but only in a very limited way. The relationships among the independent variables were low to very moderate. These correlations indicated little interrelatedness, which may point to a lack of reader awareness of the reading processes. (Author/RL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relationship between the use of intonation and reading comprehension; (2) developmental and information processing factors in second and third graders' comprehension of cause-effect relationships; (3) the script schema in children's comprehension and memory; (4) the effect of metacognitive strategy training on critical reading ability; (5) inferencing, script recognition, and short story comprehension; (6) the interaction and influence of the semantic features of text on comprehension; (7) inferential and literal comprehension after oral and silent reading; (8) relationships among three standards of error detection for comprehension of expository test; (9) the relationship between ability to classify and level of reading comprehension; (10) student cognitive processes with respect to selected Algebra I word problems measured by means of a constructed reading test; (11) the effects of illustrations on comprehension and inference by differentially skilled readers; and (12) the use of cumulative cloze procedure to investigate contextual build-up in deaf versus hearing readers. (HOD)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of reading ability, mode of presentation, and passage familiarity on the general and precise comprehension of expository text; (2) a constructivist perspective on the reading comprehension process; (3) the effect of textual moves and dialogue on the reading comprehension of first grade children; (4) imagery, postquestions, and children's learning from prose; (5) the relationship between cognitive style, motivation, and reading comprehension achievement; (6) the effects of expository textual structure on the reader's ability to form inferences; (7) a function-based comparison of illustrations providing literal and analogical representations on comprehension of expository prose; (8) the effects of different kinds of questions on children's comprehension of stories; (9) an analysis of the process of ambiguity resolution; (10) the relationship among literal and inferential reading comprehension skills and selected cognitive processes; (11) an ethnographic study of comprehension in the beginning reading process; (12) a qualitative study of the elementary age child's interaction with story; and (13) reading as signification. (EL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: semantic constructivity in children's comprehension; text-based inferences generated by children in reading written discourse; a review of reading comprehension research; the psycholinguistic processes of beginning readers; the relationship between discourse structures and critical reading; information processing and retrieval of adult college students; the effects of anaphoric references, typographically modified organizers, and oral prequestioning on reading comprehension; word analysis strategies for reading; the effect of question order on reading achievement; sentence characteristics that influence the comprehensibility of text; the effect of chunking on the recall of written discourse; types of information addition in the psycholinguistic process of reading; the relationship of knowledge of given information to reading comprehension; prose learning as a function of adjunct questions and individual differences; and the relationship of language cues used in silent reading to the semantic and syntactic cues revealed in oral reading miscues. (GW)

A series of experiments were conducted to determine what information readers use when they read to understand a story. The experiments examined both skilled adult readers and children beginning to read. Oral reading was used both because elementary school teachers frequently ask children to read aloud and because oral reading provides an indication of processing difficulty while the reader is reading. In most of the experiments, violations of different types of information--for example, a nonword, a misspelling, a semantically anomalous word, an ungrammatical word, or a factually inconsistent word--were introduced into common stories. The readers' oral productions were analyzed for disruptions around each violation on the theory that if there were disruptions, then the readers must have been attempting to comprehend the distorted information. Across the experiments it was found that (1) readers used some types of information to find words in their mental dictionaries and other types of information to comprehend sentence meanings; (2) children reading grade-appropriate stories were governed by the same reading comprehension processes as were skilled adult readers; and (3) readers adapted their reading processes to changes in the reading situation, such as when pronunciation or comprehension was emphasized, or when information was encoded differently (as in Polish and English). The pattern of results provided strong support for an interactive model of reading comprehension. (Author/FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects of metacognitive comprehension monitoring strategies on fourth grade students' reading comprehension and recall performance; (2) elementary school readers' strategy use in reconstructing textual macrostructure; (3) the impact of prior knowledge and textual information ordering on recall of unfamiliar information; (4) a hierarchy among three reading comprehension subskills; (5) reading comprehension as a function of topic interest, sex, and reading achievement level; (6) using cognitive learning strategies to improve reading comprehension; (7) the effects of context on sixth grade students' ability to interpret metaphors and similes; (8) percept and imaginal representation of words as related to the reading process; (9) the impact of metacognitive processing on immediate and delayed memory of extended discourse; and (10) the effect of text organization on memory for verbal items. (MM)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of a crowded or spaced appearance of narrative material on the reading comprehension of above-average and below-average fourth grade students; (2) the perception and use of sentence structure by good reading comprehenders and skilled decoders in contextually limited environments; (3) the use of three prereading strategies and their effects on the comprehension of junior high school students; (4) reading performance as a function of auditory sequential memory, anxiety, and age or grade level; (5) metatextual notions and reading comprehension; (6) third grade readers' use of prior knowledge in inferential comprehension; (7) gender conformity, text characteristics, and comprehension of stories; (8) the relationships between student retellings and selected comprehension measures; (9) contextual prerequisites for making inferences from text; (10) inferential listening and reading comprehension of discourse in normal and reading disabled children; (11) the effects of pictures on the literal comprehension of second grade readers; and (12) the effects of students' meaning perception and textual structuring upon the comprehension of social studies reading passages. (FL)

Part of a research project designed to develop a theory of the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading by the analysis of the location and duration of eye fixations, this paper concentrates on how eye fixations can be used to determine when encoding, lexical access, parsing, and integration processes are executed and how they are affected by various features of text. The paper first discusses the immediacy assumption, which holds that a reader tries to interpret each word of a text immediately upon encountering it, and the eye-mind assumption, which posits that the reader continues to fixate a word until all the cognitive processes initiated by that word have been completed to some criterion. It then reviews several global features of eye fixations in reading that provide support for these assumptions, noting that several run counter to common conceptions of reading. The paper next describes a general model of language comprehension based on a computer simulation that was developed both to formalize models of specific processes and to make the processes function collaboratively in an interactive system. This discussion is followed by a review of research on specific comprehension processes and an evaluation of the model. (FL)

Part of a research project designed to develop a theory of the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading by the analysis of the location and duration of eye fixations, this paper concentrates on how eye fixations can be used to determine when encoding, lexical access, parsing, and integration processes are executed and how they are affected by various features of text. The paper first discusses the immediacy assumption, which holds that a reader tries to interpret each word of a text immediately upon encountering it, and the eye-mind assumption, which posits that the reader continues to fixate a word until all the cognitive processes initiated by that word have been completed to some criterion. It then reviews several global features of eye fixations in reading that provide support for these assumptions, noting that several run counter to common conceptions of reading. The paper next describes a general model of language comprehension based on a computer simulation that was developed both to formalize models of specific processes and to make the processes function collaboratively in an interactive system. This discussion is followed by a review of research on specific comprehension processes and an evaluation of the model. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: use of word information cues by beginning readers; the relationship between problem solving and oral reading strategies; the ease with which children learn different logographic systems; the effects of adjunct questions, humor, and various learning modes on learning and retention; conceptual tempo and oral reading performance; the relationship of deep structure recovery to reading comprehension; children's ability to make inferences from written and oral material; the contributions of inference and discrimination processes to false recognition of sentences; initial consonant phoneme-grapheme correspondence errors; effects of different error types and of method of presentation of material on comprehension; the relation between syntactic form and familarity of content to reading comprehension; readers' perceptions of the reading process and of their own reading strategies; relationships between quality of oral reading errors and oral syntactic development; readers' use of contextual clues; and subvocalization during the silent reading process. (GW)

This examination of the processes in reading comprehension is divided into seven categories. "Theoretical Foundations" reviews some of the research conducted by Bruner, Piaget, and Bloom in the areas of cognition or comprehension processes of young children. "Development of a Spiraling Reading Curriculum" examines a spiraling taxonomy of reading skills and appreciations based on an emphasis on the interrelatedness of the four communication processes of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. "Background of the Research Design" discusses conceptual vocabulary, linguistic comprehension, cognitive and affective comprehension, early comprehension skills reinforcement, comprehension through discussion based on literature listening, and comprehension assessment--readiness level."Field Testing a Spiraling Reading Curriculum" discusses validating group testing for assessment, experimental classrooms, and the total spiraling diagnostic-prescriptive model. "The Research Design: A Study of Comprehension Processes in a School with a Spiraling, Diagnostic-Prescriptive Reading Curriculum" presents a research study conducted in a suburban area near Los Angeles, the results (with seven tables of findings), and conclusions and recommendations. A bibliography is included. (WR)

This paper critically reviews selected studies in the area of reading comprehension, in order to characterize the differential patterns that skilled and unskilled comprehenders employ. The research reviewed is organized into three broad components: (1) decoding, (2) accessing the meaning of single printed words, and (3) text organization processes, or obtaining meaning from larger stretches of text. Results from various studies suggest that good and poor comprehenders differ primarily in the first and third components. Speculations are offered on the interrelationships between these components and their effect on reading comprehension processes. (Author)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects on reading comprehension of a number of reader-related factors, including lookback during studying, oral versus silent reading modes, reading achievement, anxiety, attention, interest, and knowledge of subject matter; (2) the effects on comprehension of such text-related factors as analogy, metaphors, and cohesion; (3) a psycholinguistic model of reading comprehension; (4) reading comprehension of subject nominalization in different syntactic and semantic contexts; (5) developmental differences in comprehension and recall of prose; (6) units of information processing in reading; (7) short-term and long-term reconstructions of reading by tenth grade students; (8) the effect of schemata and text length on the number of inferences produced by adult readers in free recall of a fictional story; (9) discourse effects on children's resolution and recall of anaphoric relationships; (10) clustering in free recall tasks in normal and exceptional children; and (11) readers' expectations for story structures. (GT)

Most studies of eye movement behavior during reading have dealt with the processes involved with local aspects of text, such as visual or graphic characteristics or individual word features. To determine if a global level of processing (pertaining to the whole text or to large sections of it) would affect eye movement patterns differently, a study examined the pattern of movements of skilled adult readers as they encountered stories with surprise endings. The subjects, 22 college students, read three surprise-ending stories while their eye movements were monitored. As a control condition, some students read versions of the stories that had been rewritten to give away the surprise at the beginning. Results showed an increase in the number of fixations associated with rereading the surprising lines of the stories when compared to the same lines in the control condition versions. There was also a small increase in the mean duration of fixations on the surprising lines, but there was no change in mean saccade length. The findings suggest that even the most global levels of processing must be considered as an influence on the eye movement control system. A three-page list of references and graphs concludes the report. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as encodings of verbal information; conceptual background knowledge and young children's comprehension of discourse; semantic response latency and three long-term memory models; developmental aspects of reading comprehension readiness; a predictive model of prose processing; metaphors; the interference of some anaphoric expressions on reading comprehension; differential processing of auditory and visual information in lingustic and nonlinguistic forms; the effects of readability and directed stopping on the learning and enjoyment of technical material; memory in young children; verbal labels and the organization and retention of a series of movements in memory; interspersed organizers and comprehension of written prose; on-task adaptation of imagery with its verbal elaborations as adjuncts for prose learning; visual and symbolic representation in alphabetic letter recognition; reading and the comprehension of a text; the relationship between recognition and recall; readability and top-level structure; and paragraph structural explicitness and main idea comprehension of college students with varying abilities. (FL)

Two research studies were conducted to examine short term memory capacity and eye fixations as parts of the reading comprehension process. In the first study, varied aspects of the text and the readers' tasks were examined by monitoring the duration and sequence of readers' eye fixations. The results showed that readers made longer pauses at points of increased processing, such as encoding infrequent words, parsing and representing information in clauses, integrating information from more important clauses, and making inferences. One major outcome of this research was a relatively detailed process model for predicting the gaze duration of college students reading clauses of scientific texts. In the second study, it was hypothesized that individual differences in reading comprehension were caused by differences in working memory capacity. A test with heavy processing and storage demands was devised to measure the trade-off between reading efficiency and the amount of additional information maintained in working memory. When 20 college students read aloud a series of sentences and then recalled the final word of each sentence, their reading span--the number of final words recalled--varied from two to five. This span correlated with three comprehension measures, including verbal SAT and tests involving fact retrieval and pronominal reference. Similar correlations were obtained with a listening span task, showing that the correlation was not specific to reading. (RL)

Given concerns about the reading achievement of Dual Language Learners (DLLs) in comparison to English Monolinguals (EMs), this study examined individual difference variables contributing to English reading comprehension growth in Spanish-speaking DLLs and their EM counterparts in Grades 1-4. The participants, who included 578 DLLs and 412 EMs, were primarily from low-income backgrounds. They were assessed in the fall and spring of one school year on decoding, vocabulary, and oral language comprehension (established predictors of reading comprehension for DLLs and EMs); higher order strategic processes, executive functions, and reading engagement (understudied predictors for DLLs); and reading comprehension. Among the key findings were that each of the three understudied predictors was associated with reading comprehension growth over the school year, over and above the contributions of the established predictors, in both language groups. Additionally, higher order strategic processes partially mediated the relations of executive functioning in the fall with reading comprehension in the spring for both DLLs and EMs. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings for understanding and strengthening the reading achievement of all students are considered. [This paper was published in "Contemporary Educational Psychology" v61 Article 101848 2020.]

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 35 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relation of specific perceptual, cognitive, and training variables to reading skills acquisition of kindergarten students; (2) the implications of interest on the literal reading comprehension of early readers; (3) the effects of graphic organizers, text organization, and reading ability on the recall of text information; (4) the effects of training in selected SOI memory factors on reading readiness in kindergarten children; (5) children's use of story schema in successful and unsuccessful reading comprehension; (6) the role of text structure in the comprehension of information from prose passages; (7) comprehension processes of third grade children; (8) the reading strategies used by proficient adult readers to comprehend difficult expository text; (9) the effects of levels of propositional complexity and syntactic complexity upon reading comprehension; (10) young children's understanding and recall of a short story; (11) differential comprehension patterns of mature slow and fast readers in extended discourse; and (12) the instantiation hypothesis as a developmental, conceptual, and imaginal function. (FL)

To characterize basic processes of reading comprehension, this report focuses on how the reader's schemata, or knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store. The paper first traces the historical antecedents of schema theory, then outlines its basic elements, pointing out problems with current realizations of the theory and possible solutions. Following a consideration of the interplay between the abstracted knowledge embodied in schemata and memory for particular examples, it "decomposes" the comprehension process in order to examine components of encoding (attention, instantiation, and inference) and retrieval (retrieval plans, editing and summarizing, and reconstructive processes). In conclusion, the paper evaluates the contributions of schema theory to the understanding of the comprehension process and speculates on the directions future research should take. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: relationships among attitudes, intelligence, and reading achievement; the purposes and processes of reading as described by elementary school children; evaluating volunteers in reading programs; the effects of parent training in communication skills on the reading attitudes of children; the elementary school principal as instructional leader of the reading program; wordless picture books; the effect of pictures on reading comprehension; automatic level word recognition training and reading achievement; the effect of a reading center on reading scores; the ability of kindergarten children in phoneme analysis tasks; comprehension models in reading; the relationships between art concepts and reading readiness and mathematics; the effect of printed materials on beginning reading; an analysis of oral reading miscues of first grade students; sex role stereotyping in reading skills materials; teacher knowledge of reading and student achievement; the effects of adjacent-to-text activities on the development of reading comprehension skills; and strategies for reading comprehension using the cloze procedure. (MAI)