The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. This guide is a companion to the existing practice guide, "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade", and as a set, these guides…

Teacher organization is a crucial part of classroom functioning; however, its relation to student achievement has not been investigated as extensively as that of instruction. In this study, organization is defined as the amount of time teachers spend explaining the purpose and procedures of learning activities and daily routines. Data from…

Three studies were conducted to investigate changes in global procedures (memory for a whole word), component procedures (memory for a letter in a word), and serial procedures (memory for a letter sequence in a word) as a function of learning to read. (PCB)

Recognizing the apparently successful application of the modality preference approach to beginning reading in actual practice, the failure of research to support this approach is analyzed. Identified as problem areas in the research methodology are test instrument reliabilty, comparability of the teaching component to classroom instruction, nature…

A battery of various tasks was used with nine children with Down syndrome (ages 5 to 8) to assess their phonological awareness and basic reading skills. Results suggest that children with Down syndrome are at risk for reading acquisition difficulties due to reduced phonological awareness skills and that these deficits are in addition to delays…

Comparison of the reading of rhymes by 20 children with cognitive disabilities (Down syndrome or autism) and 20 typically developing children (all matched for word recognition skills) found both groups were more similar than dissimilar in their rhyme-recognition accuracy, miscues, and grapheme-phoneme knowledge. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Fifteen children (ages 5.1 to 6) received a 12-week intervention on measures of phonological processing skills and reading. At posttest, students performed significantly better than the control group on measures of phonological processing skills and in reading. Results suggest such early intervention may enhance early reading and possibly reduce…

First grade students (n=221) were tested on measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automated naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. Findings indicated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of…

Designed to assess the cognitive requirement expected or implied in beginning reading materials and in their instructional suggestions and to determine whether these materials are appropriate to the cognitive development of the children who will use them, this instrument is for use by evaluators with the first reader in a basal series. It directs…

Reports an experiment on the rapid naming of printed letter strings by third- and fifth-grade Yugoslavian children. As is consistent with previous experiments on adults, the phonologically ambiguous form of a word or pseudoword was named much more slowly than the phonologically unambiguous form. (Author/BE)

The study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and isolation-intermix instruction in teaching four preschool children to read common words in their environment. Concurrent instruction resulted in students learning conditional discriminations in fewer trials and minutes of instructional time suggesting the value of teaching…

This study, involving 54 first-grade children, found that correlations between decoding and phonological awareness were generally much higher than correlations obtained for measures of decoding and verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Several phonological awareness tasks identified good and poor decoders, with approximately 80-90% accuracy. (DB)

A longitudinal (from kindergarten through grade 2) study with 244 children evaluated 3 hypotheses regarding the causal relationship between phonological processing abilities and reading acquisition. The study found a bidirectional relationship between phonological processing skills and reading skills and stability in individual phonological…

Studied first- and fifth-grade children at different levels of reading skill in four familiarization experiments concerned with word encoding processes. Overall, supports the view that word encoding undergoes qualitative change as reading progresses from beginning to more advanced levels, although the reason for this change is unknown. (Author/NH)

A multiple probe design across behaviors was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an articulation training program that included incidental information to teach basic sight word reading. Results indicated that the three subjects (ages 5-6) with sound production errors learned to read sight words during articulation training and that this learning…