No abstract

In this paper, I argue that educational p3ychology is deeply embedded & an objectivist epistemology, the consequences of which seriously undermine our ability to inform educational practice. In the remainder of the paper, I provide an introduction to semiotics, the doctrine of signs, and offer four global concepts (the sign, semiosis, inference, and reflexivity) that I believe set semiotics apart from other, more or less related, approaches within psychology and educational psychology (e.g., constructiv&m). I conclude the paper by responding to some of the more frequently asked questions I have encountered in attempting to define an educational semiotic.

No abstract

The effects of pictorial and written (questions) adjunct aids interspersed through text on factual recall were compared. Sixty-three subjects read one of the following forms of text: questions before relevant passage, questions after, pictures before, pictures after, questions and pictures before, questions and pictures after, no adjunct aids. Results showed that reader-generated pictures and experimenter-provided questions were equally facilitative and resulted in increased retention over the control group. Question position effects characteristic of mathemagenic studies were replicated. Identical position effects were demonstrated for reader generated pictures used as adjunct aids. Implications for mathemagenics and prose learning are discussed.

Whenever we have had what we thought was a good idea about reading comprehension, we've generally found that John Carroll has had it first. He may not agree with what we have said, but he has influenced our thinking enormously. We would like to thank Jim Pichert, Al Moe, Glenn Kleiman, Joe Jenkins, and Nancy Stein for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. They deserve much credit for anything of merit to be found in the paper. This paper was written while the first author was on leave at the Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois. The Center is supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract No. US-NIE-C-400-76-0116. Comprehension Theory and Measurement AbstractThis paper suggests that reading comprehension must involve an interaction between the reader's world knowledge and the incoming linguistic message.We call this the minimal comprehension principle. After examining the measurement of reading comprehension from the perspective of the minimal comprehension principle, we conclude that most existing tests of reading comprehension are likely to be unsatisfactory for the purposes of assessing educational gain and diagnosing reading difficulty. We suggest several techniques which might be more suitable for these purposes. Comprehension Theory and Measurement 2On the Theory and Measurement of Reading ComprehensionThe purpose of this paper is to review recent developments in the theory of comprehension and to derive implications from this work for the measurement of reading comprehension. Many recent commentaries on the topic of comprehension (e.g., Otto, 1971;Simons, 1971;Stauffer, 1971; R. L. Thorndike, 1973Thorndike, -1974Tuinman, 1971) have lamented the fact that our theoretical knowledge of the comprehension process has not progressed very far beyond the observations of early reading researchers such as Huey (1908), James (1890), Richards (1929) or E. L. Thorndike (1917).While the observations of these early theorists contain many insights into the processes involved in comprehension, our view is that real progress toward the development of a psychologically valid theory of comprehension has emerged only recently from attempts to develop process models of human cognitive functioning.In the paper which follows, we will propose a minimal principle of comprehension which we have derived from recent theoretical and empirical work on the comprehension process. This principle, we believe, must be part of any serious theory of comprehension. In subsequent sections we will review several types of models of the comprehension process and show how our minimal principle is integrated within them, derive the implications of the minimal principle for the measurement of comprehension, and propose alternatives to the existing methods of measuring reading comprehension. Comprehension Theory and Measurement 3 A Minimal Principle of Reading ComprehensionThe purpose of this section is to present arguments in support of a minimal principle of comprehension. Our use of the term "minimal" ...