The students of the targeted sixth grade class exhibited low standardized test scores in reading. Despite many efforts, this problem reached a crisis point in the fall of 2001, when the school as a whole placed at the bottom of the district on the state standards test, which was taken by this group of students in the spring of their fifth-grade…

A study examined the effects of daily journal writing on kindergarten children's phonics acquisition. At St. Joseph School in Carteret, New Jersey, 21 kindergartners kept daily journals in addition to normal classroom instruction over a period of 4 months, while the 20 kindergartners in another class received only the normal classroom phonics…

This action research project highlights the implementation of reading strategies that work for at-risk primary students. The targeted population consists of first grade students located in a suburban at-risk school. The dilemma of how to best teach children to read who are at risk for academic failure upon entering school has been documented…

This report describes a program for improving student independent reading skills through direct phonics instruction. Students were exhibiting inadequate reading skills, which interfered with academic achievement. The targeted population consisted of second and third grade students from a northwestern Illinois city of about twelve thousand.…

A study examined the effects of commercially produced phonics software upon the phonemic awareness of students studying reading with the Herman Method for teaching reading. Participants were 13 middle school students in a self-contained or comprehensive developmental special education classroom. The control group of six students did not use the…

This study examined the effects of two programs which differed in the methods they employed to develop reading readiness. The two methods represented were a language experience approach and a phonics approach. The subjects were children from kindergarten classes in two elementary schools in Flint, Michigan. All subjects were randomly assigned…

A study compared the benefits of phonological awareness instruction along with and without a phonics computer software program to improve phonological and reading skills in elementary students with mild mental disabilities. During the eight weeks of the study in the fall of 1999, elementary resource students were taught phonological awareness…

This report stresses the need to incorporate various methods of teaching as a means of developing an integrated curriculum to address the lack of phonetic skills amongst second grade and kindergarten students. The target population of Site A consisted of a kindergarten classroom in a medium-sized district of a growing middle class community…

This research described strategies used to improve the reading fluency of students. The targeted populations consisted of first, second, and third grade classes from middle class communities located in the Midwest. Evidence for the existence of this problem included teacher observation, parent surveys, and lack of progress shown on reading…

A random sample and a sample of retarded readers were selected from fourth- and sixth-grade students in the Grand Prairie Independent School District. All students were tested in the areas of auditory perception, visual perception, and phonics abilities. The tests administered were: two subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test; four…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two instructional strategies for six phonic word-attack skills objectives. The study was undertaken in order to identify training procedures for helping teachers to become more effective at reading instruction. Written criterion-referenced phonic word-attack skills pretests were…

The main purpose of this study was to structure and compare two series of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and phonics generalizations. The first series of correspondences and generalizations is designed for seriously disabled readers in grades 3-9 and was derived through a phonemic analysis of the first 1,500 words of the Heritage list ( The…

Students enrolled in six developmental reading classes offered during a 16-week semester or a 6-week summer session at El Camino College (California) were pre-tested with the California Phonics Survey (form 1) to determine their phonic abilities. Students enrolled in eight concurrent developmental writing classes were similarly tested. Those from…

Second-grade pupils using the Ginn "Reading 360" or the McGraw-Hill "Programmed Reading" were compared in their reading and retelling of the story "King Alfred and the Cakes." Analysis, using the Reading Miscue Inventory, of the performance of 20 selected pupils indicated that those taught with "Programmed…

This thesis examined variations in the word decoding skills of children with reading disabilities. These variations were related to possible cognitive, developmental, and environmental causes of reading disability. Possible implications for educational interventions were also analyzed in the five studies. The thesis critically examines the…