This study describes a program designed to increase student achievement in reading. The targeted population consisted of two first grade classes and one second grade class in a small central Illinois community. The median household income was in the lower range. Evidence of the existence of the problem included the April 2000 standard testing…

This study compared the achievement of students instructed by the use of a management system, Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development (WDRSD), for word attack skills in addition to the basal reader approach with the achievement of students instructed by the use of the basal reader approach alone. Two hundred forty-four fourth grade students…

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…

Automaticity training was provided to an experimental group of eight high school sophomores whose reading achievement fell below the seventy-fifth percentile on the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Test to determine the effect of such training on reading comprehension. The 16 subjects (experimental and control groups) were pretested using the Gates…

This study compares the effect of the objectives-based test collections of the Instructional Objectives Exchange (10X) on reading comprehension and word-attack skills of fifth-grade students in a basal reader program. The 10X, a nonprofit educational organization, was established in the late 1960s to provide educators with instructional materials…

The applicability of phonics generalizations, particularly the rule "When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking and the second one is silent," is examined in this paper. The first section reports on a study of the applicability of the two vowel rule to words in first- and second-grade basal readers and on a core vocabulary list; the…

Instruction in one eighth-grade history teacher's classes varied between use and nonuse of vocabulary recognition materials for difficult words to study the possible effect of such materials on test scores. The vocabulary recognition materials were used to augment four chapters of the history textbook that the students studied, while four chapters…

A study of the effects of pictures and context cues in teaching sight word vocabulary used six high ability and six low ability first grade students for each of four experimental conditions: word alone, picture, sentence with no picture (context), and sentence plus picture. The procedures included acquisition and test trials, a retention test…