First-grade reading readiness and later academic achievement of children were studied in a program developed specifically for disadvantaged preschoolers. (MM)

"The Critical Word Factor," based on word recognition demands of texts, is a measure of text difficulty designed specifically for texts used by beginning readers. The measure is a function of the number of new, unique words per 100 running words of text that fall outside a designated curriculum. The authors investigated the validity of the…

Testing of a group of kindergarten children generally supported the hypotheses that (1) children from schools in higher socioeconomic areas would have significantly more advanced concepts of language than children in lower socioeconomic areas and (2) that this conceptual development would be correlated with more conventional measures of reading…

Three tests were conducted to contrast the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to label and relabel objects. The findings show that bilingual subjects were significantly better than monolingual subjects, supporting the view that preschool bilingual education stimulates children's cognitive development, and enhances their self-concept.…

Tests indicated that kindergarten children with impulsive conceptual tempos performed significantly lower on several measures of achievement and reasoning ability than did children with reflective tempos. (Editor)

Research indicated that visual discrimination training could compensate for the impulsive response style of first-graders on reading tests. (GW)

Kindergarten children received prereading instruction based on a code systems approach. Results suggest that: (1) kindergarten children can learn the concepts and vocabulary of code systems; and (2) such instruction is related to their perception of the nature and purpose of reading and can be incorporated into existing kindergarten programs. (PP)

Sixty second grade students participated in an investigation of the usefulness of an instructional technique, "story impressions," for improving readers' processing of unfamiliar narratives. Both above- and below-average readers in the story impressions group answered more postreading test questions correctly than did students who only read the…

This investigation of 133 first grade Ss (25 percent Hispano--75 percent Anglo and 50 percent male), found no significant correlations between objective scores of young children's self-concept and their first or second grade reading achievement. (Author)

Develomental patterns in the reading and aural skills of 45 preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children, were assessed. Children with increasing reading abilities were progressively more successful in their ability to segment words in both aural and visual contexts. (FG)

Researchers investigated the effects of sex differences on the relationship between conservation ability and the reading and linguistic awareness of five-year-old children. Findings of this study and others consistently support the hypothesis that conservation ability correlates more highly with reading in girls than in boys. (Author/PP)

This study examined two kindergarten literacy frameworks (environment and events) and their effect on kindergartners' literacy development. Observations, interviews, and pre- and postmeasures of literacy achievement indicated that students in the emergent literacy kindergarten made significantly more literacy gains than those in the reading…