The reading achievement test performance of 180 sixth grade students in contrasting reading programs was examined. One program (Matteson) was an explicitly sequenced, behaviorally oriented skills program; the other (Scott Foresman) placed more emphasis on rich language experience and less emphasis on specific skill development. An…

The equipercentile assumption states that students in traditional classrooms who receive no other instructional assistance, will maintain their relative rank order over time. To test this assumption, fall to fall test results on the SRA Achievement Tests were obtained for grades 2-3, and 6-7. Total reading and total mathematics growth scale values…

A study conducted by the School District of Philadelphia and that city's Federal Reserve Bank, entitled "What Works in Reading," was used as a case study to determine what factors influence the translation of research findings into educational policy. The Philadelphia study, which examined variables associated with achievement growth in…

The effects of sentence combining instruction on student writing skills (punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and syntactic maturity) and reading achievement were studied in eight-, nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children. The experimental group, which received instruction in sentence combining, consisted of 20 students from each age group.…

This study investigates the differences between the auditory-visual integration ability of 80 sixth grade students when such variables as socioeconomic status, sex, intelligence, conservation ability, and reading achievement were controlled. Socioeconomic Strata were determined by Hollingshead's Four Factor Index of Social Position. The California…

Approximately 4,000 children took part in a study of the reading attainments of children from different social-class backgrounds in Irish primary schools to find out if the progessive reading gap between children from different home backgrounds that has been observed in other countries could also be found in Irish school children. Tests were…

One method of delineating reading comprehension is T. C. Barrett's taxonomy, which contains the categories of literal comprehension, reorganization, inferential comprehension, and evaluation. In a study devised to test whether the categories of this taxonomy are hierarchical, a reading comprehension test developed by the International Association…

Ways that reading evaluation programs can bring reading success to individual students are presented. Each chapter is written by an authority on one of the following topics: what evaluation is, who does it, and when it should be done; reading program goals as the basis for evaluation; informal techniques for assessing prereading behavior; use of…

The minimal comprehension principle asserts that the act of comprehension must entail an interaction between an incoming linguistic message and the reader's world knowledge. An analysis of current tests of reading comprehension indicates that test passages are likely to draw broadly from knowledge of the world, so that some of the variability in…

As part of a statewide (Massachusetts) evaluation in all areas of education, the reading assessment described in this report tested all 9- and 17-year-old students in 31 school districts in an effort to examine student performance statewide as well as in the individual educational regions and communities. The first four chapters of the report…

Three hundred fifth grade pupils in an urban school district and in three rural schools in Tennessee participated in a study of relationships among attitudes toward reading, reading achievement, socioeconomic status (SES), and sex. Each pupil was rated on the Heathington Attitude Scale and the Hollingshead Two-Factor Index of Social Position and…

This study examined student attitudes toward reading and evaluated the effects of grade level, reading achievement, sex, race, and social status upon reading attitudes. Fifteen classrooms, consisting of 260 fourth and sixth grade students, participated in the study. After individual reading achievement scores were determined for each student, two…

Forty-eight black seventh-grade pupils participated in a study to test the assumption that the previously learned dialect of black inner-city pupils interferes with reading achievement. Standardized reading achievement test scores were used to classify the students in three groups representing three levels of reading proficiency. Speech variables…

This study investigated students' learning performances in reading and academic achievement after an experimental group took a reading improvement course in which vocabulary and comprehension improvement exercises were derived from their content area textbooks and a comparison group took a general reading improvement course with materials…

The problem under investigation was to determine the differential effects of three types of treatment on students' test-taking skills. The study also investigated whether test-taking instruction would result in significant mean test score gains on a standardized reading test for white and black, high and low socioeconomic status (SES) third-grade…