Focusing on trends in reading achievement during the period from l970 to l984, this report draws from national assessments that involved more than 250,000 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The first chapter (1) provides an overview of the report; (2) summarizes recent achievements documented by the…

An improvisational dramatics program was developed to improve the reading achievement and school attitudes of disadvantaged elementary school children. The program, based on the rationale that encouraging self-awareness and creative self-expression will improve communication skills, reading achievement, and attitudes, was used with 141 fourth,…

A study compared the scores of Catholic and public school students at three different grade levels on educationally pertinent characteristics such as race, ability, level of parental education, amount of homework, and high school curricular track. Subjects, approximately 2,000 Catholic school students and 30,000 public school students in grades 3,…

For a potential drop-out who had difficulty comprehending what she had read because she could not recognize a word, even though she often knew its meaning, a methodology for teaching word decoding provided an effective technique for achieving systematic early gains. Lessons for the eighth-grade girl followed this methodology: (1) decoding the…

Drawing on communications, psychological, and educational studies, this paper examines television's influence on reading performance and school achievement. The first section of the paper reviews and synthesizes major studies dealing with the introduction of television in a community and with correlations between television use and school…

The relationship of the amount of classroom time devoted to reading instruction, the number of reading related activities, and teacher instruction feedback to reading achievement at the end of kindergarten was investigated for a sample of approximately 300 children in 14 kindergarten classrooms at three schools. Based on nine rounds of full-day…

Data were collected from 123 seventh and eighth grade students to examine the relationship between the quality of television viewing time and reading achievement, age, grade, sex, socioeconomic status (SES), and intelligence quotient (IQ). Highlights of the data analyses include the following: (1) The mean weekly viewing time for the subjects was…

A three-year study was conducted at a California junior college to determine the number of college freshmen who needed assistance/counseling in reading achievement. In the first phase of the study (1974-1975), all entering freshmen were administered the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, Form C. The same instrument was used during the second phase of the…

A study was conducted to determine (1) the extent to which the degree of use of PRI/RS (the Prescriptive Reading Inventory Reading Systems, a criterion referenced management system developed by CTB/McGraw Hill) affected comparable groups of students on standardized achievement measures; (2) whether the degree of use differentially influenced…

A review of literature by reading authorities identified seven criteria necessary for meaningful research about reading readiness tests. These criteria were then used in analysis of 15 research studies dealing with the "Metropolitan Readiness Test" and first grade reading achievement. Five major findings resulted from this analysis:…

The applicability of phonics generalizations, particularly the rule "When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking and the second one is silent," is examined in this paper. The first section reports on a study of the applicability of the two vowel rule to words in first- and second-grade basal readers and on a core vocabulary list; the…

To determine if auditory sequential memory (ASM) in young children can be improved through training and to discover the effects of such training on the reading scores of children with reading problems, a study was conducted involving 92 second and third graders. For purposes of this study, auditory sequential memory was defined as the ability to…

Researchers tested 136 third through sixth graders with the reading subtests of the "Iowa Test of Basic Skills," reading tests constructed from appropriate graded reading materials, and an oral cloze test constructed from a short story whose language resembled the oral language of the children. They computed correlations (within each grade level)…

A random sample of 300 seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students participated in a comparative study of performance on social studies cloze tests, social studies group reading inventories (GRI), and a popular standardized test (Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, Survey E). It was found that cloze tests and GRIs constructed from social studies content…

A 3-YEAR STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF BEGINNING READING INSTRUCTION WITH THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (ITA) AND WITH TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY (TO) ON PUPILS' READING ACHIEVEMENT IN BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA, IS REPORTED. THE SCORES OF KINDERGARTEN PUPILS ON THE LEE-CLARK READING READINESS TEST WERE USED TO INSURE THE HETEROGENEITY OF THE TREATMENT…