Highlighting the significant reading gains of 9-year-old students and, to a lesser extent, 13-year-old students, this report presents the results of three assessments surveying the reading skills of American 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students during the 1970-71, 1974-75, and 1979-80 school years. The first chapter is introductory in nature,…

A battery of four reading readiness assessment tasks was administered to 267 first grade students to determine if the tasks predicted reading achievement as well as the Metropolitan Readiness Test (MRT). The four tasks, which were the best predictors in a previous study of seven readiness tasks, were the aural word boundaries task, the…

The effects of high intensity tutorial/enrichment treatments involving language arts process development were the major research concerns of a two-summer project designed to provide preservice and inservice teacher education students with training in the development of language arts processes and in planning for instruction corresponding to a…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects of a remedial reading program upon reading attitude, reading achievement, self-concept, and intellectual achievement responsibility; (2) a reading…

This document reviews the changes in reading in Denmark from 1934 to 1976 and discusses factors that brought about the changes. The paper indicates the importance of the library in reading development and notes that children use the library more extensively today than they did earlier. Changes in society and their effects on the educational system…

To determine specific objectives for language arts programs in Alberta schools, a study was conducted in which a comprehensive list of specific objectives was compiled for use in developing tests of reading and writing in grades three, six, nine, and twelve. Measurable objectives were ranked in terms of their importance to the total program, and…

To investigate the effect of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) on spelling proficiency, a study was devised whereby seventh grade students who had been taught reading in the first and second grade using ITA were compared with students who had been taught in the traditional manner. Each group of students was tested on the spelling sections of two…

These technical appendices give the following information: a comparison of RENP and non-RENP mean Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) Fall 1976 pretest scores; evidence of the existence of an achievement gap between Washington, D.C. and large city norms; number and percentages of students in each of three pretest achievement levels;…

This study was conducted to determine if the low reading achievement of a group of Creole-speaking first and second graders was caused by lack of comprehension (due to dialect interference) of their Standard English texts. The materials used were three stories in Creole and three stories in Standard English. Because they had never encountered…

Both teachers and parents assisted in a study of the effect television viewing has on reading achievement. Second-grade teachers in the Montclair (New Jersey) school district identified students who read at least one year above grade level (high achievers) and students who read at primer level or below (low achievers). Parents of these students…

This evaluation report is based on several types of data collected during the 1978-79 school year for the Television Reading Program (TVRP), a supplemental reading instruction project which is based on commercial television programs aired at prime time--scripts of TV programs with high popular appeal for youth serve as the basis for instructional…

A reading test and three cloze tests (English, health, and social studies passages with fifth/sixth grade readability levels) were administered to 410 ninth grade students to study the relationship between cloze errors and reading ability. Six types of incorrect responses were considered: synonymous, syntactically acceptable but semantically…

A three-way mixed factorial design was used in a study of the ways good and poor readers used context in cloze tasks. Reading ability (good versus poor readers) and booklet format (sentence versus sentence fragment presentation) served as between-subject factors, while context (whole versus partial passage) served as a within-subject factor.…

The interview techniques developed by Carol Chomsky were used in a comparative study of the language acquisition of 32 bilingual and monolingual third grade students. After these students were matched for age, socioeconomic status, IQ, family environment (both parents in the home), and reading ability, they were placed in four…

The effectiveness of previewing versus discourse analysis as methods of reading instruction was tested. Previewing (supported by schema theory) was based on the premise that helping students relate their knowledge to the content of a reading selection would facilitate comprehension. Discourse analysis (based on research on text structures)…