Evaluation studies seldom examine whether the rationales used to argue for an educational reform actually hold up when empirical evidence is examined after the reform has been implemented. This article examines survey data from 3 years of analyses of early reading interventions to examine three rationales that were used to argue for the program.…

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 90 British children beginning at school entry when they were 4 years 9 months old (range = 4 years 2 months to 5 years 2 months). The relationships among early phonological skills, letter knowledge, grammatical skills, and vocabulary knowledge were investigated as predictors of word…

In light of the current debate over the meaning of "scientifically based research", we argue that qualitative methods should be an essential part of large-scale program evaluations if program effectiveness is to be determined and understood. This article chronicles the challenges involved in incorporating qualitative methods into the large-scale…

Technical characteristics of the Reading Essential Skill Screener--Preschool Version (RESS-P) were studied using four independent samples of boys and girls aged 3-5 years. A decision efficiency study (N = 91) resulted in a total predictive value (TPV) of .85 when compared with the criterion of teacher report/judgment of emerging literacy at-risk…

Most children enter kindergarten when they are 5 years of age and move into first grade when they are 6. This time period is marked by great developmental change (Sameroff and Haith 1996), and children differ in what they can and cannot do socially, physically, and cognitively. Therefore, parents and educators are concerned whether certain…

This study explored the development of children's early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped…

Teaching ability, over and above reading programs, is the major contributor to students' literacy success. Culturally and linguistically diverse students are not receiving "a free and appropriate education" when teachers are not implementing instructional strategies that optimize student achievement or positively reinforcing their cultural…

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the…

This article presents an overview of some methods and results from our continuing studies of genetic and environmental influences on dyslexia, and on individual differences across the normal range that have been conducted over the past 25 years in the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center (CLDRC) and in related projects. CLDRC…

Picture books enable children to experience "reading" from a very early stage in their lives. Although readers in the early part of this century were trained to read heavy books full of fine print, nowadays readers are being trained to read using intellectually and emotionally challenging picture books. Such books (particularly those by…

To investigate what and how a child was learning about reading, a case study was conducted of one preliterate child's retelling of a story. The 5-year-old child (Jamie) heard the story in its complete form on the first session and then retold it each week for 8 weeks. The adult listener answered her questions but did not help unless asked. The…

Preschool reading behavior did not arise necessarily or spontaneously in an open classroom where a set of books was continually available. Because the open classroom acquires new properties and meanings when contrasted with the traditional school, complex factors influencing behavior, such as novelty and modeling, must be examined. (BJG)

TO SUPPORT THE PREMISE THAT EARLY EDUCATION REDUCES ENVIRONMENTAL DEPRIVATION AND TO SUBSTANTIATE PROPOSALS ADVANCED BY BEREITER AND ENGLEMANN IN "TEACHING DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN IN PRESCHOOL," AN EXPERIMENT WAS CONDUCTED IN A HEADSTART SETTING. TWO CLASSES, EACH OF 24 CHILDREN RANGING IN AGE FROM 3-8 TO 5-7, ATTENDED PRESCHOOL CLASSES…

THE RESULTS OF A FOLLOWUP INVESTIGATION TO DETERMINE WHETHER THE PERSISTENCE OF LEFT-LATERAL TENDENCIES OF A GROUP OF CHILDREN WAS RELATED TO FIRST-GRADE READING PERFORMANCE ARE REPORTED. THE ORIGINAL INVESTIGATION AT THE PRESCHOOL LEVEL INCLUDED 64 SUBJECTS. FORTY SUBJECTS REMAINED IN THE LOCAL SCHOOL SYSTEM THROUGH FIRST GRADE FOR THE FOLLOWUP…