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…

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…

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)

Designed to measure children's abilities to synthesize concepts from several sources, this measure is based on the assumptions that children move from the concrete to the abstract, from specific to generic, and that the ability to synthesize and form new concepts is an important prerequisite to reading comprehension. Each form of the test is…

This article presents evidence that initial and advanced reading abilities are predominantly mediated by the right and left cerebral hemispheres, respectively. Premature reliance on left hemisphere reading strategies or later failure to shift from earlier right hemisphere strategies are hypothesized as resulting in two different types of dyslexic…

Compares the ability of children at three different levels to use analogy in reading both real and nonsense words. Shows young children can successfully use analogy to decode new words. (HOD)

Two experiments with moderately mentally retarded students found that (1) adequate verbal instruction had a modest but significant effect on the subjects' ability to blend consonant sounds, and (2) training without pictorial prompts resulted in better blending than training with pictorial prompts. (Author/DB)

Reports two studies in which 5- and 6-year-old children were given word order awareness tasks, followed 3 or 5 months later by vocabulary, reading achievement, and reading readiness (for the 5-year-olds) tests. (Author/NH)

Reports results of four experiments testing whether syllable structure affects children's performance in phonemic analysis tasks and in other reading related tasks. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). (AS/Author)

Teacher self-reports of the frequency of currently advocated early literacy practices in Grades 1 through 3 were entered into regression models in an effort to predict 3rd-grade outcomes. Explicit skill instruction was a significant predictor of higher passing rates on a state examination and lower rates of special education referral but was also…

This article reviews Bakker's developmental neuropsychological model (the Balance Model) of reading development (EC 602 750), notes the need for validating research before employing these procedures in clinical practice, and raises some conceptual problems such as evidence that learning disability subtypes evolve over time. (Author/DB)

This study evaluated Frith's 3-phase model of reading acquisition with 300 children in 2 cohorts who were followed from kindergarten through grade 3. Varying relationships were found among global language abilities, word recognition abilities, and reading comprehension depending on grade level. Implications for the study and treatment of…

A study investigated suggested interrelationships of linguistic awareness, cognitive ability, and reading achievement. The extent to which differences in reading achievement were related to differences in the other areas was also explored. The Linguistic Awareness in Reading Test (LARR), the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM), and the Stanford…