Two experiments investigated the relationship between cultural schemata and reading comprehension.Black and white eighth graders read a passage that dealt with an instance of "sounding" or "playing the dozens," a form of verbal ritual insult predominantly found in the black community. Black subjects tended to interpret the passage as being about verbal play, whereas white subjects tended to interpret it as being about physical aggression. Scores on theme-revealing disambiguations and intrusions and on an inference probe task showed a close relationship to the subjects' cultural background. The evidence shows that cultural schemata can influence how prose material is A tradition of research which can be traced to Bartlett (1932) has assessed the effect of beliefs on the learning and remembering of information in brief texts. A recent example of research of this type is a study by Read and Rosson (Note 1). They used a questionnaire to identify people who were either strongly for or strongly against nuclear power.Those identified were asked to read a passage about a fire at a nuclear power station. The results on a multiple choice test given immediately after the passage showed little influence on beliefs. However, when the test was delayed one or two weeks, people tended to distort the passage in a manner consistent with their beliefs. Subjects who favored nuclear power were able to reject antinuclear statements which had no basis in the passage, but they tended to accept spurious, pronuclear statements. Cultural Schemata and Reading Comprehension 3

The effects of interest on the allocation of attention to, and the learning of, written material were investigated in this study. Twenty-three college students read 72 sentences that had been previously rated for interest. The sentences were presented on an Apple IIe microcomputer that recorded two measures of attention: sentence reading time and reaction time to a secondary task. After sentence presentation, students were given a cued recall test of the material. Results showed that although interesting sentences were learned much better, less attention was allocated to them; hence attention did not serve as a causal mediator between interest and learning. Results also indicated that subjects engaged in some strategy independent of attention to learn the interesting material. The results are discussed in terms of the development of strategies for efficient reading.

In two experiments, subjects were instructed to take a distinctive point of view while reading and recalling a story. Perspectives assigned before reading, shortly after reading, and long after reading all had substantial effects on recall. The results were interpreted to mean that the schema brought into play by the perspective instructions selectively enhances encoding when operative during reading and selectively enhances retrieval when operative during attempts at recall. The schema operative during reading appears to influence not only the likelihood that certain text elements will be learned but also their longevity in memory.

Reported are two experiments with third graders in which a number of dimensions of reading instruction were investigated. The major findings:an emphasis on meaning produces better results than an emphasis on word identification; in groups receiving a word identification emphasis, but not a meaning emphasis, results depend upon instructional time; the child who is taking an active turn gets more from a lesson than the children who are following along; and the interestingness of the material is a major factor in performance, one that is much more important than readability. The Reading Group: An Experimental Investigation of a LabyrinthThere is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, must go over the whole ground.What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, 1842/1945 The Great Debate (Chall, 1967) in beginning reading instruction is over the relative emphasis that ought to be given to decoding and meaning. The available evidence favors a decoding emphasis. It appears that reading programs that begin with explicit, direct instruction in spelling-sound correspondences are more successful than programs that rely on incidental learning of these correspondences (Pflaum, Walberg, Kanegianes, & Rasher, 1980). However, it is possible that programs that include a substantial amount of direct instruction in spelling-to-sound correspondences are successful for other reasons. Such programs typically are more structured, provide more systematic feedback, allocate more time to reading, and maintain higher levels of student engagement than meaning emphasis programs, whose advocates often believe that learning to read is a "natural process" in which it is unwise to intervene heavily (Goodman & Goodman, 1979). Thus, it can be argued that program evaluations and related teacher effectiveness research have underrepresented classrooms in which the instruction is both meaning-oriented and structured and systematic. There is at least one beginning reading program that features both a meaning orientation and systematic direct instruction, the Kamahamaha Early Education Project. It is thoroughly documented that this program achieves good results with at-risk minority children (Tharp, 1982). The Reading GroupThe Reading Group If one were to grant that direct instruction designed to produce competence in fast, accurate word identification typically is best at the beginning, an important policy question would still remain. No one doubts that the eventual goal is for children to read with comprehension. The question is, therefore, at what point in a child's development of reading proficiency should the schools stop stressing word identification and begin placing predominant emphasis on meaning?On the one hand, Venezky and Massaro (1979) have doubted that more instruction in word identification could ever be too much of a good thing.They concluded an article on the importance of rapid word recognition by saying they were no longer willing t...

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