A 2-YEAR STUDY OF THE ABILITY OF FIRST GRADERS TO LEARN TO READ USING THE "EARLY-TO-READ I/T/A/" SERIES WAS CONDUCTED. SIXTY-ONE FIRST GRADERS IN ROSE HILL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MUKILTEO, WASHINGTON, WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO AN EXPERIMENTAL GROUP USING THE I/T/A SERIES AND TO A CONTROL GROUP USING THE "GINN BASIC READERS." THREE…

AN INVESTIGATION OF TWO INSTRUCTIONAL METHODS FOR BEGINNING READERS WHICH OFFER PHONETIC REGULARITY WAS CONDUCTED AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EACH WAS THEN COMPARED TO A MORE TRADITIONAL READING APPROACH. THREE METHODS STUDIED AND COMPARED WERE (1) THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (ITA), (2) THE DIACRITICAL MARKING SYSTEM (DMS), AND (3) A BASAL APPROACH…

Second-grade pupils who were taught reading in the first grade with the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) were compared with pupils who were taught reading with traditional orthography (TO). Seventy students from two schools in Moline, Illinois, were divided into a control group (using TO) and an experimental group (using i.t.a.) and were matched…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two methods of reading instruction on children's ability to write original compositions. The subjects for this study were 684 first and second graders. Of the 293 first grade children, 130 were receiving their reading instruction in i.t.a., while the remaining 163 children were working in…

Data from four of the Cooperative First Grade Studies (1964-1965) were reanalyzed for four first grade projects, (Fry, Hayes, Mazurkiewicz, and Tanyzer). These projects were selected because they compared the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach with traditional orthography-basal reader approaches. The focal point of this reanalysis was to study the…

The relationships between prereading measures of auditory discrimination, letter knowledge, and intelligence and reading ability were investigated for pupils who completed grades 1 and 2 in four different types of instructional programs--conventional basal reading programs, i/t/a programs, language-experience approaches, and code-emphasis…

THE RESULTS OF THE CONTINUATION OF USOE PROJECT 2745 WHICH EVALUATED THE READING ACHIEVEMENT OF STUDENTS TAUGHT BY THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (ITA), THE DIACRITICAL MARKING SYSTEM (DMS), AND A TYPICAL BASAL READING SERIES (TO) ARE REPORTED. A NEW SET OF DMS MATERIALS WAS DEVELOPED AND USED IN SEVEN FIRST GRADES. THE READING ACHIEVEMENT OF THESE…

This publication contains papers contributed to the fifth Perspectives of Reading conference of the International Reading Association which focused on the teaching of beginning reading. The following approaches are described and evaluated: (1) individualized reading, (2) basal reading, (3) linguistic approach, (4) phonics approach, (5) new…

A programmed-workbook cassette-delivered approach to letter and number recognition, "From Letters to Words," was compared with a traditional method of teaching letter recognition. The subjects were 153 disadvantaged first-grade students. The 75 experimental subjects were individually instructed by the investigators and teachers on the use of the…

Twenty-seven summaries of first-grade reading studies sponsored by the United States Office of Education are included. The studies, done in the 1964-65 school year, were made in different localities, and each was concerned with a different problem. More than one-half of the directors were full-time college professors; a few were senior authors of…