The Cooperative Reading Project's purpose was to examine the relative effectiveness of three approaches to the teaching of beginning reading and the effectiveness of oral stimulation. This monograph reports the results of the last year of the project. The experimental reading treatments were: (1) the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), (2) the Words in Color (WIC) program, and (3) a Supplemented Conventional Reading Program (SCRP) which used a basic reader plus additional phonics material. Five hundred and thirty-eight subjects were used; the program's effectiveness was evaluated by the Metropolitan Achievement Test, the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the Peabody Language Production Inventory, and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The results obtained from this two year intervention gave only partial confirmation to the experimental hypothesis--that children in experimental reading groups would show greater achievement than those in control groups. Students in the SCRP group did better than those in the ITA or WIC groups. In general, the experimental reading results seem to support the inclusion of systematic phonic instruction in traditional orthography for disadvantaged children. [Due to the size of the print, data on several tables will not be clearly discernible in hard copy reproduction.] (Author/JW)