Founded on the importance of the imagination according to Greene (1995) and set by the Executive Summary of the 911 Commission Report, the mixed methods grounded theory study looks at a correlation between a set of instruction practices recognized by Egan (2008) for nourishing and developing the imagination and low-progress adolescent students’ comprehension. Descriptive data are provided on the school, students, teachers, and district where the study was conducted to illustrate the limitation and delimitations of the study. The study is limited to low-progress adolescent students as identified by the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and uses pre and post Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) mandated and administered by Orange County to establish comprehension and determine statistical significance. Participant and non-participant observations are used to triangulate and co-triangulate data to determine the correlation between the frequency of select instructional practices and students’ comprehending as evidence by their FAIR reading and Maze scores. Observation of student performance suggests that attention to the implementation of the instruction practices of using poetry, text sets, and sensory stimulation has potential in nurturing low progress adolescent students’ imagination and strengthening their cognitive feed-forward mechanism. The data adds to the existing body of work on the interactive nature of reading (Rumelhart, 1994) by elaborating on low progress adolescent students’ ability to predict and anticipate; concluding that convergent and divergent thinking, making inter-textual connections, and creating mental models are necessary sub-factors to nourish the imagination and need to be taken into account in instruction to assist low-progress adolescent students in comprehending and developing a defensible interpretation

"Do high school students read? And do the ones who read have a well-balanced reading program, or is the reading done haphazardly? Sometimes these, and similar questions, result in answers subjective in character being framed in such sweeping generalizations as today's youth does little or no personal reading. Such statements have been the motive for numerous investigative surveys. These studies have revealed the value of a permanent interest in reading as an essential aid to personal development and social culture. They have pointed out the increasing demands made by society for greater proficiency in reading. Also, they have shown the importance of the reading program in the curriculum as a medium for establishing in youth a permanent interest in reading both for information and for recreation. Thus far, however, surveys have not established the fact that reading interests and habits differ between rural and urban pupils. This study, therefore, is an attempt to discover what differences, if any, exist in the reading interests and habits between a group of rural and urban children. The pupils considered are those enrolled during the 1950-51 session in the tenth grade in Walton High School DeFuniak Springs, Florida. In the course of this paper, pupils who ride school busses a distance of two miles or more are to be identified as 'transported' pupils; those who live within a radius of two miles of the school center and who do not ride school busses are to be referred to as 'non-transported' pupils"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1952." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert G. Clapp, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-48).