The major purpose of this descriptive study was to identify the reasoning strategies used by seventh- and eighth grade severely disabled remedial reading students when attempting to comprehend expository and narrative prose. Additional research questions dealt with the most frequently used strategies; correct responses to questions through the use of strategies; strategies used when responding to narrative and expository prose; strategies used when answering literal and inferential questions; and the strategies used by individual students.

The ability of students to segment the speech stream into phonemic units and to analyze (make judgments as to same or different) beginning consonant phonemes was assessed at grades kindergarten through third from both high and low socioeconomic groups. Segmentation ability was assessed by the use of a test of actual words in a match-to-sample task, a test of synthetic words requiring a same-different judgment and a task which required deletion of a phoneme from a known word to form a new word. Three prerequisite abilities were also assessed: auditory acuity and understanding of the concepts "same" and "different" with regard to sounds, and "beginning" with regard to sequence of sounds.

The problem investigated in this study was whether students who received computer-assisted reading instruction would display positive attitudes toward reading six or more months after the instruction was completed. A Likert attitude scale was administered to thirteen pre-adolescent and adolescent subjects to assess their attitudes toward reading six or more months after they had received computer-assisted instruction (CAI). In addition, a questionnaire was administered to the subjects' parents to determine their perception of the subjects' attitudes toward reading. Data obtained from the Likert scale indicated that the subjects' attitudes toward reading were neutral. An analysis of responses to the parent questionnaire revealed that the students' attitudes toward school-related reading were positive as a result of CAI. This study concluded that CAI had no apparent positive impact on the subjects' attitudes toward recreational reading.

This study measured the effect of mode of discourse and developmental factors on composition length, syntactic complexity, and sentence-production error rate in the writing of secondary school students. The study also included a descriptive analysis of syntactic and logical patterns found in the sentence production errors. The 297 students whose writing samples provided the data for this study were enrolled in grades 7, 9, and 11. The students were divided into low and high within-grade developmental groups. Each student wrote two compositions, one in the descriptive mode and one in the persuasive mode.