A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of six approaches to beginning reading instruction (basal, linguistic, phonic, programed reading, i/t/a, and unifon) in schools serving educationally disadvantaged children and to determine the effectiveness of lay aides in project classrooms. Subjects were approximately 4,000 pupils in primary…

The Oakland County, Michigan, first-grade study of the effectiveness of three approaches to beginning reading was extended to the second and third grades to investigate differences in their effects on reading and related language development. Each of 11 research teams chose three classrooms which used either the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach…

Six children from one first-grade classroom were videotaped 18 times over a seven-month period, while reading aloud complete stories. Analysis of the first 50 miscues and the last 50 miscues in both new and familiar materials read by the children yielded profiles of each child's oral reading strategies. The major findings indicated that these six…

The inconclusive results of research comparing beginning reading methodologies in the 1960s led many schools to change their approaches to beginning reading instruction. In the 1970s the focus has shifted from the belief in a single method as superior for all children to the attempt to match methodology to the needs of individual children. A…

The responses of 84 children (42 in kindergarten and 42 in first grade) while trying to identify sight words that were similar in sound (bowl/pole), similar in sound and shape (boat/boot), or dissimilar (cup/moon) yielded information about phonetic composition as a source of information by which beginning readers identify sight words. The…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, the second phase of a preliminary study was devised that modified the pretest, the instructional modes and format, the sequence and amount of information presented in the instructional sessions, and the procedures for testing and…

The 21 essays in this collection consider the conditions under which reading is most effectively taught and learned. Topics deal with the ways in which a desire to read can be "caught" by children in their early years; the case for humanistic education; the need for changes in people's attitudes toward learning and teaching; ways of…

This book reviews the research literature relevant to the language experience approach to the teaching of reading, in which instruction is based upon the use of reading materials created by writing down children's spoken language. The first major section provides a narrative review of the research studies, organized, for the most part,…

Tests for prereading skills of Israeli kindergarten children were developed and tested on a wide range of socioeconomic levels. Based on studies in the United States and Israel, tests were developed for letter matching, rhyming, sound matching, and letter recognition. Results from 178 kindergarten children led to a division of the letter matching…

This study examined first grade children's spelling of vowel sounds in relationship to the spellings these children were taught in their reading series and to the phonological aspects of the sounds. The subjects for the study were 12 first graders, six boys and six girls, in a public school in a Boston suburb. Written work done in school was…

This conference report contains the following papers: "Ability versus Knowledge in Testing Educational Achievement" and "Knowledge vs. Ability in Achievement Testing," by Robert L. Ebel; "A Four-Domain Taxonomy for Classifying Educational Tasks and Objectives," by Bruce W. Tuckman; "On the Social Psychology of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Further…

In this study, eight groups of kindergarten children were trained to discriminate position and order differences in verbal and nonverbal item sequences in the context of a matching task or an associative learning task or both. Transfer was measured by having the subjects sight learn a list of words contrasting in position and order. Subsequently,…

This study was designed to explore the role of the syntax of beginning readers' spoken language in their reading performance. In order to be able to isolate and manipulate the syntactic variable, two alternative forms of English, Standard English and Black English, were used. Sixty second-grade children participated in the study. Each child was…

A kindergarten pre-reading program was designed based upon Piagetian and Montessorian theory. During the pilot study, pre-reading experiences, materials and games were created to encourage individual diagnosis and specific pre-reading skills assessment. The following year the investigator conducted a descriptive study of the program's…