TWO EXPERIMENTAL METHODS intended to improve inferential reading comprehension were investigated with second-grade children. One method focused on a prereading strategy in which children utilized previous experiences to predict events in the upcoming story. The second method provided practice in answering questions which required inferences between text and prior knowledge. The instruction was applied to ten basal-reader stories. Four dependent measures compared the comprehension ability of the two experimental groups and a control group. On comprehension questions following the instructional stories, the performance of the children in both experimental groups surpassed that of the control children. Standardized test scores and scores on an

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17851/ctrstreadtechrepv01980i00166_opt.pdf?sequence=1

The Effects of Inference Training and Practice on Young Children's Reading Comprehension.

The Zone of Potential Development: Implications for Intelligence Testing in the Year 2000. Technical Report No. 128.

THIS STUDY investigated the effectiveness of a direct instruction model for teaching children the comprehension skill of main idea. Sixty-six, sixth-grade students, blocked on achievement level, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups: a Strategy group, in which subjects received intensive main idea instruction according to a direct instruction paradigm developed by the author; a Basal group, in which subjects were administered massed basal lessons on main idea comprehension from a current, popular basal series; or a Control group, in which subjects engaged in unrelated vocabulary development exercises. A series of dependent measures assessing students' ability to recognize and produce explicit and implicit main ideas at the paragraph and short passage levels indicated a powerful treatment effect favoring the Strategy group over both the Basal and Control groups. These results are interpreted as further support for the efficacy of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching children reading comprehension skills.

The Effectiveness of a Direct Instruction Paradigm for Teaching Main Idea Comprehension.

A discrete-trials color naming (Stroop)’paradigm was used to examine activation along orthographic and phonological dimensions in visual and auditory word recognition. Subjects were presented a prime word, either auditorily or visually, followed 200 msec later by a target word printed in a color. The orthographic and phonological similarity of prime-target pairs varied. Color naming latencies were longer when the primes and targets were orthographically and/or phonologically similar than when they were unrelated. This result obtained for both prime presentation modes. The results suggest that word recognition entails activation of multiple codes and priming of orthographically and phonologically similar words.

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Orthographic and Phonological Activation in Auditory and Visual Word Recognition. Technical Report No. 178.

In an effort to train less skilled readers to pay closer attention to hierarchical coherent aspects of text, students were taught to represent text structurn in nodes-relations flowcharts. Two training studies were conducted. Subjects were students from two community colleges. A pretest-posttest design with controls was employed. The analysis of data in Study 1 showed that a significant improvement on the NelsonDenny (1973) Comprehension scores was accompanied by an improvement in the quality of posttest text flowcharts produced by experimental students. In Study 2 an experimental group of lees-skilled readers improved significantly more than a comparable control group on the Nelson-Denny Reading Comprehension test. On another comprehension test, designed to measure students' sensitivity to interpropositional relations, experimental students performed significantly better than control students. In addition to the statistical analyses in Study 2, samples from experimental students' written products were subjected to indepth analyses. These analyses point to qualitative changes in text flowcharting, and support the quantitative analyses. Facilitating Reading Comprehension through Flowcharting FlowLharting

Facilitating Reading Comprehension through Flowcharting.

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED165114.pdf

Lynne M. Reder

Papers

Comprehension and Retention of Prose: A Literature Review. Technical Report No. 108.