Teaching reading has been an ongoing challenge for many educators across the United States. Numerous studies suggest that teachers feel they were not adequately prepared to teach reading and have low efficacy in delivering literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires educators to be knowledgeable about the alphabetic principle, decoding new…

More than one third of American children cannot read at a basic level by fourth grade (Lee, Grigg, & Donahue, 2007) and those numbers are even higher for African American, Hispanic and poor White students (Boorman et al., 2007). These are alarming statistics given that the ability to read is the most basic and fundamental skill for academic…

Study attempted to examine the long range effects of ITA. (MB)

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…

This brief essay argues that the best way to improve student achievement is to increase parental teaching of children prior to school entry. The essay is accompanied by an annotated bibliography summarizing 14 empirical studies which document a significant positive relationship between parental teaching and student achievement. It is contended…

The Cooperative Language Development Project studied the efficacy of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) in teaching beginning reading and the efficacy of the Peabody Language Development Kits in stimulating verbal intelligence, creative thinking, school achievement, and language development. In this monograph, a post-test and follow-up evaluation…

The purpose of the three-year Cooperative Language Development Project was to examine the efficacy of an oral language development program and an experimental reading program in improving the academic achievement, language development, intellectual functioning, and creative thinking of disadvantaged children in primary grades. The experimental…