A program was designed to improve the progress of average and below average readers in a first-grade, a second-grade, and a sixth-grade classroom in a multicultural, multi-social economic district located in a three-county area northwest of Chicago, Illinois. Classroom teachers noted that students were having difficulty making adequate progress in…

This study investigated the effects of instruction and practice in test-taking techniques upon the standardized reading scores of 7 remedial, 19 developmental, and 9 advanced reading students in the sixth grade. "The Nelson Reading Test (Revised Edition), Form A" served as a pretest. Both constructed and commercial materials were used to instruct…

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…

The purpose of this study was to determine if significant differences exist between mothers', fathers', and teachers' expectations for kindergarten children's reading development and their appraisals of kindergarten children's readiness for reading. The sample population in the investigation consisted of kindergarten children, the children's…

The purposes of this dissertation were to study the relationship between the use of performance objectives and the importance of reading comprehension; to ascertain the relationship between the use of performance objectives and the learning of textbook material; and to determine if, by providing training in the use of performance objectives, the…

This study addressed the following three questions: Among the grammatical patterns that first graders are expected to be able to read, are there any which are particularly easy or particularly difficult to interpret? Can these grammatical patterns be mastered with equal ease by students of varying reading ability? Do these grammatical patterns…

In this study to determine the effectiveness of an inservice training program in reading, subjects included 321 seventh- through ninth-grade students and 26 teachers of English, math, science, and social studies in one school in Wakulla County, Florida. The inservice plan included a summer workshop in which teacher competencies and educational…

This study investigated the relative importance of the major factors associated with the habit of reading or nonreading. Some 2,731 seventh-grade students were the subjects of the study; from these, 487 were identified as either readers or nonreaders, and, from this group, 22 students were selected for additional in-depth case studies. From over…

The purpose of this study was to compare the characteristics of kindergarten readers with those of children who entered kindergarten but could not read. One hundred thirty children were identified as readers and 130 children were randomly selected from each of the readiness and non-readiness groups in the Madison, Wisconsin public schools. A…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the status of nonfiction in the reading interests of second, third, and fourth graders and to determine the effectiveness of a personal reading record as a measure of reading interests. All students in the second, third, and fourth grades of a middle-class rural area in central New Jersey served as…

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…

This study investigated whether summer vacation accounts for more of the reading achievement gap between minority and non-minority children than does the school year. To test for the summer effect, the reading subtests of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills were administered to approximately 1,200 fifth-grade children in 15 public schools in…

This study describes certain characteristics of early readers, with emphasis on their accomplishments on eight Piagetian tasks. The early readers were defined as those children who were between four and six years old, who could read at the pre-primer level or higher, and who had not attended elementary school. The population of the study consisted…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the comparative efficiency of three summer programs in helping junior high school boys increase their reading ability. The study compared the alternatives of methods typically used in remedial reading programs, a content area program, and one which simply provided personal reinforcement. Each sample…

The primary purpose of this study was to discover what intermediate-grade children say about choice of topic, time for writing, the act of writing, and difficulties encountered in writing. A second purpose was to obtain data on four questions: is there is a relationship between the intelligence of these children and teacher appraisal of pupils'…