Although many may think that a child learns to read in kindergarten or first grade, research indicates that learning to read and write can start at home, long before children go to school. Children can start down the road to becoming readers from the day they are born. Very early, children begin to learn about spoken language when they hear family…

Intended primarily for teachers and administrators, this paper presents 20 guidelines as the basis for an evaluation procedure for workbook, skillbook, and ditto master components of basal reading programs. The paper begins with a discussion of how and why workbooks are used in the classroom, a description of the original study from which the…

The biggest campaign ever to improve the reading achievement of America's children is going on right now. The United States Department of Education, the National Institute for Literacy, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the United States Department of Health and Human Services--all members of the Partnership for…

Intended for practitioners, this is the first booklet in the Research-Based Practices in Early Reading series published by the Regional Educational Laboratory at Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. The 31-page booklet summarizes research on fluency and fluency instruction and describes strategies for fluency instruction. It also explains…

To investigate the differences between an instructional program that explicitly emphasized both decoding and comprehension and one that emphasized only comprehension, a study engaged two groups of first grade children identified as being at risk for learning to read in both effective decoding instruction and meaningful comprehension and thinking…

This report provides administrators and supervisors of reading programs with information to help them evaluate and select commercially developed reading materials. Part 1 opens with a description of the problems researchers studying the adoption of basal reading programs have observed and then offers suggestions (based on both research and…