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Three broad categories of comprehension skills (sentence, anaphora, and intersentence syntax) were divided into a total of 55 separate skills. Two different sentences or sentence pairs were written to incorporate each of the structures studied, and a four- or five-sentence paragraph was then written to incorporate each of these. Four question types (rote, transform, semantic substitute, and compound) were used to test comprehension of the structures; therefore, four test forms using these different question types were made for each paragraph. The subjects, fourth graders from an inner city, a suburban, and a rural school, were randomly divided so that 60 students responded to each question. The mean percentage of the students correctly answering the sentence comprehension questions was 73 percent; the anaphora comprehension questions, 77 percent; and the intersentence questions, 58 percent. The structures identified seemed to represent homogenous classes of behavior since the variation between questions measuring different skills was significantly greater than the variation between items measuring the same skill. The fact that the structures and question types differed significantly in difficulty was also taken as evidence that many of these skills may be hierarchically related. Tables and references are included. (CM)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert