The objective of this study was to compare the effects of two types of advance organizers on the comprehension of fourth grade students. The students' reading achievement levels were identified, and prior knowledge of the topics presented in the passages was assessed.Six intact classes were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups. The first group was given a prose organizer before reading each of the passages; the second group received a discussion organizer; and the third group participated in both types of organizers. All of the activities were presented by the regular classroom teachers.The appropriate treatment and a selected passage were given to each group on the same day. On the following day, the subjects were asked to complete a cloze test constructed from selected portions of the passage. This procedure was repeated four times.A three factor analysis of covariance with repeated measurement of the four posttests was used to analyze the data. Reading achievement was used as the covariate in the analysis. Subjects were classified as to treatment group and high or low prior knowledge. Results indicated that the composite posttest means of the groups differed significantly. There was, however, no interaction between treatment and prior knowledge or between treatment and repeated presentations.The Student-Newman-Keuls procedure was applied post-hoc to test the difference among the means. The treatment group receiving only the prose organizer differed from the other two groups with lower passage comprehension. It was concluded that the discussion organizer alone or with a prose organizer facilitated better passage comprehension. / Department of Elementary Education

Getting familiar with the code is a challenging activity and therefore resource intensive. The larger the software code base, the larger the resource expenditure. We consider software development in the case of established software developed by mid to large mature teams. This thesis explores a new way of documenting code that could increase the productivity of software development. The method consists of creating small, dynamically-ordered sets of code locations called Landmarks. These sets called Journeys are significant for a feature. The landmarks contain documentation related to system behavior and qualitative system state information at the time when the software execution reaches the locations. This new type of documentation is very light and does not require extensive additional software systems for management. This information is stored, and shared in a seamless manner via the existing source control systems. An experiment was performed to gauge the efficiency of this method versus the current development practice. The difference of productivity between developers not using this approach versus developers benefiting from this approach was captured. The results could be qualitatively interpreted as pointing towards an overall increase of productivity for the participant developers using the new approach.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two modes of prereading assistance on fifth-graders' literal and interpretive comprehension of selected material. Readers of average ability were considered. The two modes of prereading assistance studies were Directed Reading Question introductions (tape-recorded prereading assistance given pupils which set purposes for reading by having them read to find answers for specific questions) and Cognitive Organizer introductions (tape-recorded prereading assistance given pupils which included both general information about the topic and a preview of the sequence of events in the passage). Additionally, one-third of the pupils were given no prereading assistance and were used as the Control group. From an original population of all fifth-grade pupils reading on grade level in Anderson, Indiana's twenty-eight elementary schools, fifth-graders in three representative schools were chosen by the Assistant Superintendent. All fifth-graders in these three schools (159 subjects) were given Ransom's Cloze Test as an initial screening device. Those students scoring between fourth and seventh-grade instructional level, inclusive, on the Cloze Test were individually administered the Silvaroli Classroom Reading Inventory. Of the fifth-graders found to have an instructional reading level of fifth-grade, sixty-three were randomly divided into three groups, the Directed Reading Question group, the Cognitive Organizer group, and the Control group. The Directed Reading Question and Cognitive Organizer groups listened to the appropriate tape-recorded introductions before reading each of the three reading passages (three-selections from SPA Kit IIIb), and then answered the posttest questions over each passage. The Control group received no prereading assistance before reading the passages and answering the posttest questions. All materials, the introductions, passages, and fifteen literal and fifteen interpretive subtest questions were validated by a panel of reading experts. Additionally, all materials were field tested with fifth-graders reading on grade level from a fourth representative Anderson School. Kuder-Richardson-20 reliability estimates for the subtests were .69 and .78. Total posttest was .85. Nine null hypotheses were tested using Bonferroni t procedures and multivariate and univariate analysis. Using the .05 level of confidence as the predetermined criterion, six of the nine null hypotheses were rejected. On the total posttest, the scores of the three groups were significantly different. The students who received the Cognitive Organizer introductions scored significantly higher than the other two groups on the total post-test. The Directed Reading Question group scored significantly higher than the Control group on the total posttest. In the three cases involving individual subtests where the null hypothesis was not rejected (those comparing the DRQ and CO groups on the literal and interpretive subtests and that comparing the DRQ group and CG on the interpretive subtest), existing differences, though not statistically significant, favored the Cognitive Organizer group over both the other two groups, and the Directed Reading Question group over the Control group. The findings of this study indicate in general that for these particular students, subject to the limitations of this investigation, the Cognitive Organizer type of introduction was superior to the Directed Reading Question type of introduction and to giving no introductions at all. Giving the Directed Reading Question introductions was more facilitative than giving no prereading assistance. While the results for the individual subtests were statistically significant in only three of the six cases, all existing differences favored the Cognitive Organizer treatment over the other two treatments, and the Directed Reading Question treatment over the Control treatment. It would appear that under the limitations of this study, students benefited most by being exposed to introductions which gave both general information about the topic and a preview of the sequence of events in the passage. Those who listened to the Directed Reading Questions and read to find answers for specific questions did better than those who were asked to read the passages without being provided any "mind-set" for the selections.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Alternate Visual Formats (AVFs) would cause a significant difference in the subjects' comprehension as compared to their comprehension of a passage in the Traditional Visual Format (TVF). The study used an equal number of male and female subjects that were as homogeneous as possible in terms of: grade levelreading levelsocio-economic statusgeneral academic achievementThe difference in comprehension was measured by having the subjects answer a set of eight multiple choice questions immediately following their reading of each of the three passages. The passages were taken from-,a commercially published Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) and two had their printed formats each modified to a different AVF. The set of questions that were used with each passage came from an initial. pool of twenty-four. This pool was created by modifying the published IRI questions to a multiple choice format and constructing additional questions for each passage. A pilot study was conducted; a point biserial analysis was used to select the questions which were subsequently used in the study. The results of the subjects' performance on these questions were then analyzed.Two methods of analysis were employed to analyze the data. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to determine whether there was any difference in the subjects' comprehension due to format, sex, or a combination of these factors. The results of this analysis revealed that there was a significant difference in the subjects' comprehension due to format (F= 27.05 at 0.0000 probability). This analysis further indicated that there was no significant difference found when the comprehension of the male and female subjects was compared (F = 1.81 at 0.1894 probability). Neither was there any significant comprehension of a particular form by a particular sex (F = 0.12 at 0.8854 probability). The only significant difference in comprehension was found to be due to form. The second method of analysis was the Newman Keuls procedure which yielded results that showed the subjects were able to comprehend the TVF passage significantly (beyond the .01 level) better than either of the AVF passages. There was no significant difference between the mean scores of the AVF passages.These findings indicate that the AVFs as used in this study both acted to impede the subjects' comprehension to a significant degree. This impediment in comprehension appeared, In this study, to be due to the formats which were used. The findings suggest that printed formats that differ to a greater or lesser degree from a TVF may act to significantly interfere with comprehension.

This study compared the effects of ReQuest, a reciprocal questioning procedure, and the Directed Reading Activity (DRA) on the reading comprehension of average reading achievers in the fourth grade. Fifty-seven subjects from two schools were assigned randomly to two treatments, a ReQuest group and a DRA group. Each treatment group was subdivided into four instructional groups containing seven or eight subjects. Each instructional group received one-half hour of reading instruction outside the regular classroom for twenty-three days.Each of two trained teachers instructed two ReQuest groups and two DRA groups using scripts based on the reading textbook employed in both schools. In the preparation-forreading segment of the lesson the subjects in'-the ReQuest group asked the teacher questions about the first sentence of the story and the teacher reciprocated with additional questions. This procedure was repeated for each sentence until the subjects were able to predict the content of the story or the first two paragraphs had been covered. In contrast, the DRA group followed the procedure indicated in the teacher's manual of the reading textbook. Silent reading time was controlled and the preparation-for-reading and postreading discussion times were measured.The Comprehension subtest of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests served as the pretest-posttest measures. Gain scores were utilized in a 2 x 2 analysis of covariance in which the factors were the teachers and treatments with preparation-for-reading and postreading-discussion time as the covariate. In addition, the proportion of correct answers given by the students to questions posed by the teachers after silent reading were summed for each week to serve as six repeated measures in a 2 x 2 x 6 analysis of covariance. The treatments and schools were the other factors with the covariate being preparation-for-reading time. In both of these analyses there were no significant differences between the schools or between the ReQuest and DU groups in reading comprehension performance. A post hoc analysis of proportions resulted in no significant difference between treatment groups with regard to their ability to answer factual or inferential questions.

The present study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of four encoding strategies upon the retrieval of text material as measured by both immediate and delayed recognition and a recall test given in random order. Subjects included 140 college freshmen enrolled in reading and in study skills classes assigned to either a hierarchal organizing, notetaking, underlining, or repetitive reading encoding strategy. Training was given in each strategy and mastery at a criterion level of 80 percent or better was achieved. Reading comprehension scores as measured by the Nelson - Denny Reading Test, Form C were used as a covariate. An experimental passage of 1,656 words with a 12th grade reading level was administered. Findings were that there were no significant differences between treatments for immediate or delayed essay and multiple choice test scores. Reading scores correlated significantly with the dependent measures. Further, all four encoding strategies resulted in maintained test performance scores on both delayed essay and multiple choice tests. There were significant differences between immediate and delayed essay test scores for classes in favor of the reading classes. Test order did not influence test scores.

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Software visualisation is an important weapon in the program comprehension armoury. It is a technique that can, when designed and used effectively, aid in understanding existing program code. It can achieve this by displaying information in new and different forms, which may make obvious something missed in reading the code. It can also be used to present many aspects of the data at once. Software, despite many software engineering advances in requirements, design and implementation techniques, continues to be complex and large and if anything seems to be growing in these respects. This means that techniques that failed to aid comprehension and maintenance are certainly not going to be able to deal with the current software. Therefore this area requires research to be able to suggest solutions to deal with the information overload that is sure to occur. There are several issues that this thesis addresses; all of them related to the creation of software visualisation systems that are capable of being used and useful well into the next generation of software systems. The scale and complexity of software are pressing issues, as is the associated information overload problem that this brings. In an attempt to address this problem the following are considered to be important: abstractions, representations, mappings, metaphors, and visualisations. These areas are interrelated and the first four enable the final one, visualisations. These problems are not the only ones that face software visualisation systems. There are many that are based on the general theory of the applicability of the technique to such tasks as program comprehension, rather than the detail of how a particular code fragment is shown. These problems are also related to the enabling technology of three- dimensional visualisations; virtual reality. In summary the areas of interest are: automation, evolution, scalability, navigation and interaction, correlation, and visual complexity. This thesis provides an exploration of these identified areas in the context of software visualisation. Relationships that describe, and distinguish between, existing and future software visualisations are presented, with examples based on recent software visualisation research. Two real world metaphors (and their associated mappings and representations) are defined for the purpose of visualising software as an aid to program comprehension. These metaphors also provide a vehicle for the exploration of the areas identified above. Finally, an evaluation of the visualisations is presented using a framework developed for the comparative evaluation of three-dimensional, comprehension oriented, software visualisations. This thesis has shown the viability of using three-dimensional software visualisations. The important issues of automation, evolution, scalability, and navigation have been presented and discussed, and their relationship to real world metaphors examined. This has been done in conjunction with an investigation into the use of such real world metaphors for software visualisation. The thesis as a whole has provided an important examination of many of the issues related to these types of visualisation in the context of software and is therefore a valuable basis for future work in this area.

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No description available.