Effects of attributional retraining on the career beliefs and career exploration behavior of college students.

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of attributional retraining as a career counseling technique for college students. Participants who received the attributional retraining treatment viewed an 8-min videotape designed to foster internal, controllable, and unstable attributions for career decision making. Participants in the control groups viewed a similar videotape that lacked any reference to career-related attributions. Results revealed that participants who received attributional retraining exhibited significant changes in career beliefs and attributional style and engaged in significantly more career exploration behavior than the participants in the control groups. An evaluation of attributional retraining as a career-counseling technique for college students is provided, and ideas for further research are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhancing academic achievement in college students through attributional retraining and instruction.

Attributional retraining is a therapeutic method for reinstating psychological control that may be useful for improving students' achievement in the college classroom. After attributional retraining or no training, internal- and external-locus students observed a videotaped lecture presented by either a low- or a high-expressive instructor in a simulated college classroom. One week later they wrote a test on the lecture and on a homework assignment. Attributional retraining improved external, but not internal, students' performance on both the lecture and homework tests. Expressive instruction also enhanced lecture- and homework-related achievement in external students but not in internal students. These results suggest that cognitive factors influencing students' perceived control (e.g., internal/external locus) must be taken into consideration when remedial interventions for academic achievement are developed. The results are interpreted within a social cognition framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Story comprehension and recall in learning-disabled versus normal college students.

24 learning-disabled (LD) and 24 normal college students rated stories on the importance of their idea units. LD Ss showed significantly less agreement on their importance ratings than the normal Ss. Ss also selected 12 idea units as retrieval cues, one group before and the other after recall. This task showed that normal Ss selecting cues after recall used a different strategy than those selecting cues before recall; LD Ss did not vary their cue-selection strategy as a function of experience. In spite of these differences, recall increased significantly at higher importance levels for both ability groups, and recall did not differ for LD and normal Ss who selected retrieval cues after recall. Cue selection before recall, however, depressed performance of LD Ss relative to that of the normal Ss. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of question-generation training on reading comprehension.

Explored the effects of training in question generation on comprehension question performance, quality and form of generated questions, and accuracy of predicted comprehension. 260 6th-grade students were placed in 1 of 5 experimental groups: question training, question-generation practice, inference question-response practice, literal question-response practice, and no-question control. Groups met for 5 40-min lessons over a 2-wk period and were subsequently assessed during 2 testing sessions. Results indicate that Ss trained to generate questions for expository passages outperformed the comparison groups on several comprehension and metacomprehension measures. No interactions between reading skill and treatment condition were observed. Implications are drawn for the continued need for carefully developed tests of reliable strategy-training paradigms and for the implementation of question-generation activities with elementary school students. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of music on reading comprehension of junior high school students.

This quantitative study was an investigation of the effect of lyrical music on reading comprehension by adolescents. Existing research has produced results that range from concluding such distraction may be detrimental to finding it could be helpful. The reading comprehension subtest of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, 4th edition (MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dryer, 2000) was administered to 334 7th- and 8th-grade students. Testing was conducted under two conditions: a nonmusic environment, and with accompanying music comprising Billboard Magazine's (2006) top hit singles. Following the music portion of the test, students completed a survey to assess any preference for or against listening to music while studying. Results of an analysis of variance showed performance declined significantly when listening to music. A point biserial correlation illustrated a pronounced detrimental effect on comprehension for students exhibiting a stronger preference for listening to music while studying. Results are important for understanding influences on study habits, with the goal of helping educators and school psychologists design support systems tailored to the needs of adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension.

To examine the relationship between knowledge of word meanings and semantic processes, 27 4th-grade children were taught 104 words over a 5-mo period. Following instruction, Ss performed tasks designed to require semantic processes ranging from single word semantic decisions to simple sentence verification and memory for connected text. On all these tasks, instructed Ss performed at a significantly higher level than controls matched on pre-instruction vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. Thus, instructed Ss gave evidence both of learning word meanings taught by the program and of being able to process instructed words more efficiently in tasks more reflective of comprehension. Implications for vocabulary instruction and the role of individual word meanings in comprehension are discussed. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generative processes in reading comprehension.

In M. C. Wittrock's (1974) generative model of learning with understanding, reading comprehension occurs when readers actively construct meaning for text. Two experiments were conducted with a total of 488 6th graders, in which time to learn was held constant across all treatments. It was predicted and found that the facilitation of generative processes by the insertion of paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about story paragraphs during encoding produced the greatest comprehension, followed in turn by instructions to generate sentences, the insertion of paragraph headings, and then by reading the same stories without generative instructions or paragraph headings. The combination of inserted paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about paragraphs approximately doubled comprehension and recall in each experiment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive processes as predictors of word recognition and reading comprehension in learning-disabled and skilled readers: Revisiting the specificity hypothesis.

Examines how cognitive processes interrelate as well as predict learning-disabled (LD) readers' word recognition and reading comprehension performance. Correlations between phonological, orthographic, semantic, metacognitive, and working memory measures with reading performance were examined in LD and skilled readers (aged 8–12 yrs). LD Ss were deficient on all cognitive processes compared with skilled Ss, but these differences do not reflect IQ scores. Reading ability group differences emerged on a component composed primarily of working memory measures (referred to as "g") as well as unique components, suggesting that these differences emerge on both general and specific (modular) processes. G best predicts reading comprehension for both groups, and phonological awareness best predicts skilled Ss' pseudoword reading, whereas g best predicts LD Ss' pseudoword performance. Overall, LD Ss' information processing difficulties were described within a general working memory model that views such children as having difficulty accessing and coordinating both general and specific processes. Results suggest that the cognitive processes that contribute to reading deficits are best understood in the context of their combination with other operations rather than in isolation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of reading purpose on inference generation and comprehension in reading.

There are variations in the extent to which particular types of inferences or activations are made during reading (G. McKoon & R. Ratcliff, 1992; M. Singer, 1994). In this study, the authors investigated the influence of reading purpose (for entertainment or study) on inference generation. Participants read 2 texts aloud and 2 texts for comprehension measures. Reading purpose did not influence off-line behavior (comprehension) but did influence on-line reader behavior (thinking aloud). Readers with a study purpose more often repeated the text, acknowledged a lack of background knowledge, and evaluated the text content and writing than did readers with an entertainment purpose. This pattern was stronger for the expository text than for the narrative text. Reading purpose, and possibly text type, affects the kinds of inferences that readers generate. Hence, inferential activities are at least partially under the reader's strategic control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategy use on standardized reading comprehension tests.

Strategy use and its impact on standardized reading test performance were investigated. High school students were randomly assigned to 2 groups, standardized test and main idea, with separate control and think-aloud conditions. In the standardized think-aloud group, students thought aloud while taking a portion of a reading test, consisting of passages accompanied by several questions each. In the main idea conditions, students read the same passages with the lower level questions removed and answered a single multiple-choice question about the main idea of each passage, having been told that the task was not a test. Both groups used strategies, and students in the standardized test condition made significantly greater use of strategies than students in the main idea condition. Significant between-group differences were found in use of rereading. In comparisons between the think-aloud and control conditions, thinking aloud was found to have a significant detrimental effect on students' ability to identify passage main ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of a strategy-based intervention on the comprehension and strategy use of struggling adolescent readers.

This study examines the impact of the Learning Strategies Curriculum (LSC), an adolescent reading intervention program, on 6th- and 9th-grade students' reading comprehension and strategy use. Using a randomized treatment–control group design, the study compared student outcomes for these constructs for 365 students who received daily instruction in 6 LSC strategies and 290 students who did not receive intervention instruction. After 1 school year, 6th-grade students who received intervention instruction significantly outperformed students in the control group on a standardized measure of reading comprehension and reported using problem-solving strategies in reading to a greater extent than students in the control group. There were no significant differences between 9th grade intervention and control groups in reading comprehension or strategy use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sociometric differences between learning-disabled and nonhandicapped students: Effects of sex and race.

The relation of sex and race to learning-disabled (LD) children's popularity and rejection by peers was investigated by comparing the number of positive and negative peer nominations received by 76 LD and 669 nonhandicapped (NH) White and Black children in Grades 3 through 5. Results indicated less popularity and greater rejection for LD students. Furthermore, a Group?×?Sex?×?Race interaction for negative nominations was found, indicating that White LD girls were most disliked of the LD group. It was suggested that greater dislike of White LD girls may be due to discrepancies between the achievement of LD children and their same-sex, same-race peers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Embedding reading comprehension training in content-area instruction.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of comprehension training embedded in a program that taught science content to 2nd graders. The program included instruction about the structure of compare-contrast expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of well-structured text exemplars. This program was compared with a program that focused on the science content but included no compare-contrast training as well as with a no-instruction control. Regular classroom teachers (14 from 4 schools), randomly assigned to treatment, provided the instruction; 215 students (7-8 years old) participated. The study replicated acquisition and transfer effects found in an earlier study, that is, transfer to compare-contrast text with content related and unrelated to the instructional content (with no loss in the amount of science content acquired). The program also led to better performance on written and oral response measures and on 1 of the 2 measures involving authentic (less well-structured) compare-contrast text. These findings support and extend previous findings that explicit instruction in comprehension is effective as early as the primary-grade level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationships of three components of reading fluency to reading comprehension.

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading comprehension test in a model including inferencing skill and background knowledge. The study supports an automaticity effect for word recognition speed and an automaticity-like effect related to syntactic processing skill. In addition, hierarchical regressions using longitudinal data suggest that fluency and reading comprehension have a bidirectional relationship. The discussion emphasizes the theoretical expansion of reading fluency to 3 levels of cognitive processes and the relations of these processes to reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Letter differentiation and rate of comprehension in reading.

375 adults were given 90 sec. to read passages of about 450 words printed in 1 of 7 typefaces equated for size. They had then to answer 10 open-ended questions on the content. Of the typefaces without serifs Gill Medium, the letters of which were judged by typographical experts to be fairly strongly differentiated, was comprehended reliably faster than Grotesque 215 and 2 versions of Univers, in which the letters were judged to be less well differentiated (p     

Increasing reading persistence and altering attributional style of learned helpless children.

28 4th–6th grade learned-helpless children (as determined by the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Questionnaire and Effort Versus Ability Failure Attribution Scale) assessed as reading below grade level were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 treatments: (a) partial reinforcement with single failure lengths, (b) partial reinforcement with multiple failure lengths, (c) partial reinforcement with multiple failure lengths and indirect attribution retraining, and (d) partial reinforcement with multiple failure lengths and direct attribution retraining. Direct attribution retraining involved covert rehearsal of self-instructional statements. Results indicate significant increases in reading persistence for Ss who had received attribution retraining compared to single failure length controls. In addition, direct attribution retraining was significantly more effective than no attribution retraining in increasing Ss' attributions to effort on the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Questionnaire. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interspersed postpassage questions and reading comprehension achievement.

Examined the effect of interspersed postpassage questions on reading comprehension of 54 2nd graders classified as having top, middle, or lower 3rd entering reading level. Ss were either instructed in the use of questions or taught reading in a regular fashion. Results from the Reading Comprehension subtest of the SRA Achievement Series show that although questioning instruction had little effect on the above average readers, both normal and below average readers made significant gains in comprehension when instructed in the use of postpassage questions. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Instructional approaches that significantly increase reading comprehension.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the most widely used literacy instructional approaches on the reading comprehension of Grade 2–6 students. Participants (N = 660) were enrolled in 4 districts in the United States; 53% were male (n = 348) and 47% were female (n = 312); 51% were Caucasian (n = 338), 23% were African American (n = 149), 21% were Hispanic (n = 138), and 5% represented other ethnic backgrounds (n = 35). Sixty-two percent came from low to low-middle socioeconomic status schools, and 38% came from middle to high socioeconomic status schools. The study was a quantified experimental versus controlled group comparison. Analyses of variance were used to determine the differences between literacy scores. Two-level hierarchical linear modeling analyses were used to examine the effects of school variables on academic achievement. The highest comprehension scores for all populations occurred through three approaches. When struggling readers received 20 min of instruction with 1 of these 3 approaches, their literacy growth was equal to or greater than that of their peers. Implications are that treatments using classroom books produced significantly higher comprehension scores than workbook practice or extending basal treatments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of speech variety on teachers' evaluation of reading comprehension.

Investigated how 2 speech varieties, standard English and Black English, used during an oral reading and recall task influenced 64 White and 8 Black teachers' (mean age 36 yrs) evaluations of reading comprehension and how teachers' attitudes toward Black English related to those evaluations. Measures included the Oral Reading and Recall Evaluation, the Reading Miscue Inventory, and the Language Attitude Scale. Although the proportion of variance accounted for by the overall model was not great (11%), significant contrasts between the evaluations of 2 readers, one a Black English speaker and one a standard English speaker, were found with teachers who held negative attitudes toward Black English. No significant contrasts were found with teachers who held positive attitudes toward Black English. Results indicate that Black English readers were rated lower in reading comprehension than equivalent standard English readers when teachers held a negative attitude toward their language. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)