Basic Skills Resource Center: Teaching Reading Comprehension to Adults in Basic Skills Courses

摘要

This research note reports on the success of attempts to teach marginally literate soldiers to increase quickly their ability to read Army texts, magazine articles, and newspaper reports with comprehension. The teaching procedures, written curriculum materials, and microcomputer-based curricula developed in these efforts make use of principles of generative learning which provide a new understanding of how to teach reading comprehension to marginally literate soldiers in regular basic skills classes. In a series of three research efforts, three written curricula and one micro-computer-assisted curriculum were developed and used in order to teach reading comprehension to soldiers in Basic Skills classes on four Army bases. Compared with a control Basic Skills class, and with pretests, the experimental curricula, using readings selected primarily from Army manuals, increased reading comprehension by 20% in nine hours. The microcomputer-assisted instruction reduced learning time from nine hours to five hours, a saving of 45%.