Describes and evaluates the Test of Awareness of Language Segments (TALS), discussing the test administration, scoring, interpretation, reliability, and validity. Recommends TALS for evaluating a child's readiness for reading instruction, and for suggesting appropriate instructional interventions. (MM)

Reviews "Happily Ever After," a reading readiness program that is designed to help those children who lack many of the concepts and abilities assumed by most readiness programs. (FL)

Designed to explore new reading readiness predictors that are not found extensively in the more commonly used commercial group tests and to develop new indices to measure the level of reading readiness of beginning first graders, a study was undertaken involving 115 children. The factor of sex in reading readiness was also investigated. An…

Data collected during the standardization of the 1976 Metropolitan Readiness Tests (MRT) were examined to provide information on sex differences in prereading skills. The MRT are designed for administration either at the beginning of kindergarten or between kindergarten and first grade. Performance on the six subtests and the total test on both…

Notes that research supports the idea that children are confused about concepts related to beginning reading instruction. Reports on assessment instruments that are commercially available or can be devised by teachers. (FL)

The black dialect grammar and vocabulary of 20 inner-city first grade children were assessed partially for the purpose of evaluating the children's reading readiness. (BRT)

Forty-nine reading games were designed by reading aides in the ESEA Title I Primary Reading Aide Program in Omaha, Nebraska for practice and mastery of specific reading skills at the primary level. Games are listed under these skill areas: alphabet, consonants, digraphs, rhyming words, sight words, and vowels. An illustration is provided for each…

In response to the first of the National Education Goals (1991), which reads, "all children in America will start school ready to learn," this paper addresses four interpretations of the term "readiness" and the methods that have been devised to assess children's learning at the outset of formal schooling. The idealist or nativist view claims that…

Discusses Jean Piaget's information-processing model of cognitive development. (FL)

A study examined the relationship between reading instruction method, sex of learner, word learning proficiency and reading achievement in the first grade. Subjects were 78 males and 88 females chosen from two white, middle class suburban schools, one having a sight vocabulary instruction program, the other a phonic basal program. Students were…

Prereading assessment was first used to predict school readiness and was an assessment of the child's visual and oral vocabulary skills. By the 1970s, readiness assessment had changed from assessment of a child's developmental probability for success or failure in reading to an assessment of the child's skill development in relation to the reading…

Concludes that despite a significant relationship between conservation and intelligence, neither is a significant predictor of reading achievement. (RB)

Identifies the concept of reversibility (an awareness of the prior situation after a transformation of shape) as an area of difficulty in the Piagetian concept of transitional conservation. (RB)