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)

Suggests that reading programs should be structured to include group work and interaction so that children gain a sense of "I-Thou" community through reading instruction. (JC)

Describes a successful English writing program for Navajo kindergarten children in Ganado Primary School (Arizona), which encourages children to draw and write in journals. Indicates that many Navajo students enter school with the capacity to move directly into daily writing and have already formed strong concepts about written language. (MH)

This article discusses the poor reading achievement of African-American children in urban schools and argues that prevention efforts must begin prior to kindergarten. Key variables influencing young children's performance, including poverty, general oral language skills, dialectal variations, home literacy practices, standardized testing bias, and…

This study was designed to examine whether there is a relationship between phonological memory and reading ability in Greek-speaking children aged between 6 and 9 years. An additional aim of the study was to investigate whether training of phonological memory during preschool years enhances reading achievement during early school years. In…

This paper provides an overview of hyperlexia, a condition found in children who have precocious reading skills accompanied by significant problems in language, learning, and social skills. These children are described as having superior auditory and visual memory but seem to have better memory for isolated words than words recalled in context.…

To determine the factors accounting for children's growth in decoding skill, a study examined school entering characteristics--age, sex, ethnicity, and developmental abilities--and school-influenced skills and characteristics--phonemic awareness, letter-name knowledge, basal text, and place in series--of approximately 100 grade one students.…

To determine the relationship of reading ability to age, sex, Hispanic ethnicity, and majors in economics, political science, history, and psychology, 141 students who completed summer social science courses at a California community college were given the Nelson Denny Reading Test, which scores for vocabulary and comprehension. Of the 141…

To determine developmental patterns in emergent reading behaviors of young children, a longitudinal study was conducted of two-, three-, and four-year-old children's language when asked to "read" a favorite storybook. Thirty-two middle and low income children from a daycare center took part in four studies spaced over a year; four children were…

A study investigated the development of information processing as it relates to the development of reading skills by studying how good readers and poor readers utilized orthographic information. Subjects, 90 good and poor readers from grades 2, 4, and 6, participated in four 30-minute sessions in which they were required to make a same/different…

A study was conducted to describe conceptions of the usefulness of reading (the function or "why" of reading) and conceptions of the reading process (the form or "how" of reading) among preschool and first grade children in Sweden. The research paradigm used--based on the work of Vygotsky and Piaget--was called the "second…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) reading achievement as a function of home media environment and orientations toward learning; (2) reading ability and offense categories of delinquents; (3)…

Proceeding from a definition of "story schema" as an idealized internal representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationships among those parts, this paper explores the role of story schemata in reading comprehension. The paper also identifies variables that may affect the way in which schemata function and outlines the…

An alternative curriculum for Freshman Composition, designed to help students develop cognitive skills useful for academic writing in other courses, involves eight discipline-specific assignments, building from relatively simple writing tasks such as taking lecture notes and keeping an academic journal, through book reports, essay examinations,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 39 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) oral reading behaviors of early readers; (2) the effects of pictures and mode of presentation on the prose comprehension of third and fifth grade children of…