Evaluation of a Technique to Enhance Reading Comprehension

A reading comprehension strategy called "networking" was developed and evaluated in the context of an 8-week reading lab. The technique was designed to help National Technical Institute for the Deaf students identify the conceptual ideas within a text, specify the relative importance (hierarchical relationships) of these ideas, and recast the textual information in a diagram which makes the ideas and their respective relationships visible. The results of precourse-postcourse assessment indicated that students exhibited a significant improvement in their ability to summarize the gist of passages, answer factual questions, and judge the relative importance of ideas following networking training.