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: (1) inferential questions in four basal readers; (2) reading instruction in an effective school setting; (3) the social-emotional dimension of teacher-student interactions during beginning reading instruction; (4) the effects of story enactment and teacher-led discussion on preschool children's story comprehension; (5) the use of modified maze procedures to improve the reading comprehension of first grade children; (6) the influence of a prekindergarten teacher's whole language model of reading on a group of parents; (7) the development of children's text summarization skills; (8) pictures, adjunct questions, and learning from text; (9) factors related to book sharing behaviors of parents and young children; (10) the effects of illustrations on a context method of learning reading vocabulary for fourth grade students; (11) the effect of small group and computer assisted inference training programs on students' comprehension of implicit causal relationships; (12) the effects of imagery training and listening to fairy tales on reading comprehension and creativity of third grade students; and (13) function word recognition in beginning reading. (FL)