State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi…

Examines the utility of teaching reading using rime-based reading strategies with prereaders. Measures rhyming, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge, phonological working memory, First Nations language speaking ability, and reading. Concludes that progress in phonological awareness and word reading can be enhanced in prereaders by adding…

Examines the differential effects of sound boxes and sound sort phonological awareness instructional techniques on preschoolers' phonological awareness performance. Finds that children in the sound box group significantly outperformed children in the sound sort group on isolating medial sounds and segmenting phonemes. Reveals that preschool…

Finds teaching prereading kindergartners in the rime analogy strategy and prereading skills resulted in more reading than teaching either alone. Notes many children developed the untaught abilities of medial and final phoneme identity and the letter recoding reading strategy; and children were able to generalize the rime analogy strategy to read…

Two studies evaluated the use of the Student Team Reading (STR) and Student Team Writing (STW) program in urban middle schools. The first study investigated the use of STR in 20 experimental sixth-grade classes in three schools matched with 39 classes in three control schools. The second study investigated the use of STR and STW in sixth, seventh,…

Among 68 rural learning-disabled students in grades 5-7 having moderate decoding fluency and high decoding accuracy, a paraphrasing cognitive strategy increased reading comprehension of main ideas more effectively than repeated readings or control training. Paraphrasing plus repeated readings was no more effective than paraphrasing alone. Contains…

Investigates the effectiveness of instruction in story mapping as a means to promote first-grade students' comprehension of central story elements in children's literature. Concludes that instruction in story mapping is an effective instructional strategy for promoting first-grade students' ability to identify central narrative elements in…

Scores for five subjects (Reading, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies in grades 2 through 8) from the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program were analyzed for several hundred Tennessee grade schools. Schools which owned the Accelerated Reader learning information system (a computer program which allows teachers to monitor…

Investigates the effectiveness of a direct instruction model for teaching children to comprehend anaphoric relationships. The results provide further support for the efficacy of a direct instructional model for teaching children reading comprehension skills. (HOD)

A study was conducted to evaluate the impact of predictable stories given to children from low-income families over a two-year period. Phase one subjects were all the children (N=52) from four Headstart classes; phase two subjects were all the children who had participated in phase 1 and who entered kindergarten after their last year in Headstart.…