Reports on a pilot program for developmental placement in Brevard County, Florida. Discusses various aspects of the program, including teacher education, student screening, parent involvement, cost, and program evaluation. Asserts that developmental placement aids students' academic progress. (MM)

Focusing on the Prereading Skills Program, this report furnishes the results and evaluations of a field test by fourteen teachers in ten Wisconsin and Illinois schools. A total of 23 kindergarten classes and 545 children were involved in the program, which teaches three visual skills and two sound skills related to the reading process and…

Discusses the concept of "emergent literacy," contrasting this term with the concept of reading readiness. Proposes that a program of kindergarten instruction related to literacy should provide opportunities for children to interact successfully with print. (MM)

Expresses a joint statement of concerns about present practices in pre-first grade reading instruction and makes recommendations for improvement. Guidelines and recommendations are the result of a collaboration among six national organizations. (KS)

This study examined the validity of letter-name fluency and nonsense word fluency (NWF) measures as indicators of early reading skill with 39 kindergarten children who were tested again in first grade. Evidence supportive of validity was found for both measures, with NWF receiving the strongest support and both fluency measures more sensitive than…

To investigate the relationship between a kindergartner's prior experience with print and the child's scores on Marie Clay's Concepts About Print Test, a study examined 23 kindergarten students from an upper middle class neighborhood. A 27-item questionnaire was given to parents at the beginning of the school year, asking what their children knew…

This study was concerned with assessing both prereading and reading activities on the kindergarten level. A questionnaire survey was made of selected aspects of the content and conduct of the kindergarten prereading and reading programs in school districts throughout the state of California. The questionnaire used consisted of three parts: Part 1…

This report presents the evaluation outcomes of the Get Set Day Care Program currently operating in the School District of Philadelphia and outlines the contents of the instructional program designed to reach these goals. It was hypothesized that the Get Set Day Care children with two years of previous Get Set Day Care experience would: (1)…

The purpose of this research was to determine the effectiveness of the Frostig Developmental Program of Visual Perception in effecting gains in reading readiness scores and perceptual motor ability with kindergarten students and reading achievement scores and perceptual motor ability with grade one students. High, middle and low groups in both…

Word-learning and reading-readiness tasks administered to inner-city kindergartners indicated that readiness skills included both a general skill that predicted success for both sight-word and sound-symbol methods of instruction and other specific skills which predicted success for only one method of instruction. (AA)

Suggests that early identification should not focus on predicting which children will fail, but should concentrate on determining which skills children need in order to be successful in reading. (JM)

A group of 30 nonreading kindergarten children who received 7 weeks of instruction in phoneme segmentation and letter names/sounds were assessed on segmentation and reading measures. They outperformed a language activities group, which received instruction in letter names/sounds and additional language activities, and a group receiving no…

This study examined the effect of chronological age on kindergarten children's reading readiness skills. Specifically, we ask whether chronological age should be considered when making decisions about academic redshirting: the practice of delaying younger children's entrance into kindergarten. We were concerned particularly with reading readiness,…

To study the effect of nursery school attendance on reading readiness at the kindergarten level, a questionnaire was sent to the parents of 40 kindergarten students in order to determine which children had attended a nursery school program, when, and for how long. Scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills were then recorded for all respondents. The…