This paper introduces a new affective instrument for assessing the reader self-perceptions of students in grades seven through ten. The Reader Self-Perception Scale 2 (RSPS2) builds upon its predecessor, the RSPS, a tool that measures the reading efficacy beliefs of children in grades four through six. New items were created for the RSPS2 to reflect differences in the expectations for adolescent reading. The instrument was piloted on 488 students, revised, and then validates with an additional 2,542 students in the target grades. Factor analytic procedures revealed four factors emerging on the RSPS2. Items for Progress, Observational Comparison, Social Feedback, and Physiological States clustered as expected into scales with reliabilities ranging from .87 to .95. The article includes a description of the instrument, an explanation of its possible uses in assessment, instruction, and research, as well as directions for administration, scoring, and interpretation.

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To learn maximally from texts centering on controversial topics, readers must suspend attitudinal biases in the interest of objectivity. The present study examines the extent to which issue-related attitudes influence readers' comprehension and retention of information presented in an impartial text. It expands upon previous research that has yielded equivocal findings by considering readers' (a) ego-involvement with the issue, (b) prior knowledge, and (c) purpose for reading. In an immediate and delayed recall phase, readers opposing nuclear power were compared with those not opposed to it on a series of dependent measures that involved either low-level outcomes or judgmental tasks. No effect of issue-related attitude was found for the selective encoding or recall of low-level data; however, when open-ended questions required readers to make summative text-based decisions about the issues, their protocols exhibited attitude-consistent response tendencies in the immediate learning phase. The findings are explained in terms of differences in the nature of post-reading tasks and reader's perceptions of intrinsic and extrinsic goals.

lthough the highly popular Accelerated Reader (AR) book reading incentive program claims to motivate children of all reading ability levels, very little independent empirical research has examined this assertion. To help fill this void, we used two related three-factor mixed designs with Method (AR vs. Control), Gender; and either Grade Level (fourth vs. fifth) or Reading Ability (high vs. low) to explore AR's influence on the reading attitudes and self-perceptions of children intwo comparable school districts. The analyses indicatethat ARpositively influenced academic reading attitudes, but not recreational ones, and that it negatively influenced two types of self-perceptions in low achieving male readers. These findings and others ofconsequence arediscussed along with implications for future research.

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An experiment compared readers' use of analogic and pictorial illustrations for understanding and remembering complex instructional text. High school students (N = 102) read procedural texts under six analogic and pictorial illustration conditions and attempted to apply the texts' content in an applied performance task. Two weeks later students were evaluated on their attempts to perform the same task from memory. Pictures proved helpful for both immediate performance and delayed performance. Analogy was helpful for delayed performance but only slightly more helpful on immediate performance. Results are discussed in terms of apparent functions of analogies and pictures.To comprehend texts and learn from them, effective readers deploy the images they generate in reading with some deliberation, resorting to a number of strategies for increasing the meaning of the content and for remembering it as they find it necessary. By organizing images produced in response to a text, readers can create fictions to help them understand the text's content. These may take the form of direct or symbolic fictions and may turn upon highly imaginative creations which sometimes personify what is not human, sometimes animate the inanimate (cf. Gordon, 1961;Khatena, 1983). The fictions readers image occur primarily as incipient visual representations (Iser, 1972, Kosslyn, 1980Sless, 1981). To form a fiction, readers structure images so that they cor-63 64 Journal of Reading Behaviorrespond to features of their current state of knowledge, which may include established routines for problem solving and remembering. By variously organizing them as if into placeholders in rhetorical analogies (as in patterns A:B::B:C, A:B::C:D, etc.), readers can structure images into heuristic fictions useful for discovery and invention (DeBono, 1970; Gordon, 1961;Vaihinger, 1924Vaihinger, /1935. The success with which readers form useful fictions may well depend upon readers' comprehension and memory demands and the extent to which text features help readers meet those demands. When the demands are to gain spatial orientation, pictures may prove helpful (Dean & Enemoh, 1983;Dean & Kulhavy, 1981). When the demands are to gain mnemonic advantage, anologies may be in order (Honeck, Riechmann, & Hoffman, 1975). When the comprehension demands are both spatial and mnemonic, a combination of pictures and analogies might work best (Mayer, 1975;Royer & Cable, 1976).Research on readers' use of illustrative devices in texts suggests overlapping and perhaps complementary functions of pictures and analogies. Mayer (1975) found that analogies as well as schematic drawings improved readers' interpretation of a passage on computer operations, but he drew no conclusions about the differential contributions of either. In a related vein, Royer and Cable (1976) found that both analogies and pictures facilitated recall on a transfer task, but, again, their study did not permit any differentiation of pictures from analogies in their use by readers. A study by Rigney an...

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