Academically high-risk children who had participated in an efficacy-oriented intervention program were compared to a group of high-risk nonintervention children and a low-risk comparison group. The high-risk intervention and low-risk children had stronger beliefs in personal control over academic success; these beliefs were good predictors of…

Individual differences and the role of advance organizers in reading comprehension were examined. Subjects read short passages sometimes preceded by a given type of advance organizer. Good readers showed greater recall of detail given either type of advance organizer; poor readers displayed enhanced recall of detail only for a particular type of…

Forty-eight participants read one of three texts (high explanatory, low explanatory, and standard) that varied in the degree of explanation of basic concepts of elementary probability. Performance test data showed that participants in the high-explanatory test condition did equally well on both formula and story problems. (Author/LC)

Three experiments were performed to investigate differential recall of prose materials as a function of the number of decisions made about the content during reading. Results indicated that (1) recall is increased as the number of decisions is increased and (2) the effects on recall are noted only in conditions requiring decisions. (Author/LC)

A new approach to measuring readability is proposed based on the analysis of texts as causally connected chains of actions, physical states, and mental states. Using the inference load formula reflecting the difficulty readers have in inferring causal connections, the difficulty of texts can be adjusted for readers differing in skill or knowledge.…

In two experiments, high school students read and listened to either a signaled or nonsignaled expository passage. Signals consisted of preview sentences, underlined headings, and logical connective phrases. Results indicated a pattern in which the signaled groups performed better on recall of conceptual information and on generating high quality…

Fifth-grade students (N=111) read a short, nonnarrative passage and wrote answers to a set of textually explicit (TE), textually implicit (TI), schema-based (SB), or text irrelevant (CONTROL) questions. Results indicate that TE and TI questions promote text-based question-answer interactions; SB questions promote both text-based and schema-based…

The relationships between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse code-like temporal patterns were investigated. College students performed better when the first pattern was auditory. No relationship for college or fifth-grade students was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones.…

The cued forgetting of reading-delayed boys was compared developmentally with that of normal reading agemates. First-, third-, and fifth-grade boys were presented with slides of common objects. Remember (R) and forget (F) cues followed each picture. Differentiation between R and F items increased as a function of developmental level and reading…

Ten- and 12-year-old students received instruction that demonstrated the terms and relationships of conditional syllogisms. Both discovery and rule instruction increased average performance on written syllogistic reasoning tests; discovery instruction was generally more effective than rule instruction. (Author/LC)

Context-dependent metaphoric sentences of literally equivalent paraphrases were used as concluding statements for short didactic passages to investigate whether metaphors help or hinder prose comprehension. Adult participants' recall protocols indicated increased memorability for passages with metaphoric conclusions. (Author/LC)

This replication of research on the development of strategies for studying texts showed that Papua New Guinean university students made the same discrimination between linguistic units of a prose passage as did the original American sample. Intentional study instructions and provision of extended study time, however, had minimal effect on recall…

This study examines children's knowledge of structural properties of expository text: topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion. Nearly all who completed the paragraph-construction tasks were able to identify paragraphs. Seventh-graders were adept at describing what makes a paragraph but experienced difficulty in placing main-idea…

This study examined the degree to which student performance in constructing macrostructures in Chinese prose is affected by three text features: number of ideas, metaphoric expressions and advance organizer. Results showed that fewer ideas facilitated macroprocessing, metaphors did not influence idea organization, and advance organizer resulted in…

This study investigated the possibility that direct instruction in story constituents and their interrelations could enhance children's organization in story writing. It also investigated whether the special instruction might affect quality, coherence, use of temporal and casual relations, and creativity in writing. (Author/JAZ)