Paid or volunteer assistants can help a teacher in several ways. They can give students positive reinforcement and can help them correct their work. Assistants can also perform specific tutorial tasks including directing oral reading, assisting with phonics and sight vocabulary, and helping students improve their comprehension. (TJ)

Describes a project in which 11 parents volunteered to be trained as aides in a primary classroom for 13 trainable mentally retarded children aged 5 to 8 years. (CB)

This article synthesizes results from 5 studies that used noncertified tutors to work with at-risk primary-grade readers. Each of the studies featured (1) twice-weekly tutoring lessons that included guided reading, word study, and reading for fluency; and (2) supervision of the tutoring by a knowledgeable reading teacher. Results from the 5…

This manual is designed to inform parents about their role in the Behavior Analysis Follow Through Program. This program was designed to meet the educational needs of low-income students in the kindergarten through third grades and was validated as an effective and exemplary educational program by the U. S. Office of Education. The program…

This paper describes the parental involvement component of Project Follow Through, a Federally funded program designed to follow up on the children who had participated in Project Head Start. Comments and impressions gathered from interviews with teachers, parents and administrators in school districts that were linked to one Follow Through…

Describes the author's year as a volunteer in the writing workshop in her son's first-grade classroom. Discusses her experiences and reflects on the growth she saw in children as readers and writers. (SR)

Jumpstart, a homegrown before-school tutoring program piloted at a Massachusetts school, has proven successful with at-risk first graders. Implemented as a low-cost alternative to Reading Recovery and Success for All programs, the 18-week action-research project employed 11 inclusion and Title I aides as volunteers. (MLH)

There are a number of ways in which parents can serve as role models in helping children to value reading, including parent-child sharing of culture through family rituals, reading aloud to children or having the children read aloud, tutoring at home and in the schools, using home learning kits for skill development and to provide a carry-over of…

The accountability movement has forced educators to expend energys during the past few years ensuring that students master a developmental sequence of skills in the major content areas. In mathematics this has resulted in an emphasis upon computational proficiency, and, in the view of many mathematics educators, not enough time has been spent on…

Findings of a recent Oregon Department of Education survey of elementary school principals are reported. In fall, 1988, questionnaires were mailed to 789 elementary school principals in the state. A total of 694 responded. The survey was designed to provide insight into important trends in kindergarten and first grade. The following topics were…

Tennessee's Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio project (Project STAR) was designed to study the effects of class size on pupils in primary (K-3) grades. Responses of Project STAR teachers (N=1,003) to the annual Teacher Exit Interview are summarily reported for 1986 through 1989. Generally, the perceptions of teachers in small classes, in regular…