As a result of federal legislation, the effects of mainstreaming of special needs students are being felt now more than ever. Regular classroom teachers are responsible for much of the instruction for special needs students, even though they may lack necessary training in effective teaching techniques. Teachers of social studies may feel…

A study investigated the results of the use of Form E (Vocabulary and Comprehension subtests) of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT) with six successive cohorts of freshmen entering a midwestern state university. The purpose of the study was to determine the relationships existing between NDRT scores and other indicators of academic success such…

The reading program developed at Niagara University in New York has undergone a number of changes in response to long term evaluation. In the early 1970s, the only program evaluation tools used were pretests and posttests. These were misleading, as they measured only short term gains, not retention after completion of the course. Based on ideas…

In response to the assertion that reading is a fixed set of processes that can be identified and studied independently of context, a study was initiated based on the following assumptions: that different types of reading (prose comprehension and text search) can be identified and measured, that reading competencies are highly associated with uses…

Learner and program control of content review within computer assisted instruction (CAI) were studied to determine their effects on the posttest performance and attitudes of eighth grade students. The science-related instructional treatments were completed by 98 students who were blocked by gender and reading ability and randomly assigned to…

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 68 first graders to identify what ideas young readers hold about the reading process. Specifically, the study questioned whether good and poor readers held the same views about how they learned to read, what they and others did as they read, their reading ability, and why people read. The responses of…

This report includes proceedings from the Family as Educators Conference which aimed (1) to clarify the roles parents have in supporting their children's achievement in literacy and motivation for school learning (i.e., attitudes affecting school work and attendance), and (2) to assess the viability of parents' educative roles in light of current…

In order to analyze the effectiveness of school districts in Kentucky, a study looked at basic skill test scores in reading and language at two grade levels, 3rd and 10th. In order to take into account student differences between school districts, the percentage of students in the "below average" range on the Short Form Test of Academic…

Recognizing the importance and difficulty of meeting the needs of the gifted reader in the regular classroom, this resource guide is designed to give the classroom teacher activities to use with the gifted reader. After the introductory sections describing the purpose and philosophy of the guide and a short presentation on the levels of thinking…

Two studies were conducted to determine whether the consonant errors displayed by readers with severe reading disabilities are the result of phonetic rather than visual substitutions. In the first study, the reading and spelling performance of three groups of readers with average IQs but with reading levels two years below grade level, was…

Two studies were conducted to extend the application and explore the parameters of the concept tree and rational set generator instructional design techniques. The first study was conducted with high school English students. Results indicated that students who studied the concept tree performed no differently on the classification tests than…

This paper examines the relationship between strategies for recall of verbal material and the reading ability of 10-to-13-year-old children. Sixty-five fifth and sixth graders, whose reading levels were determined by the Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension Test (1964), were given an orally presented word-string repetition task. While performance on…

Two hundred Honolulu-area students from the fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth grades participated in a study that examined the variables effects of five selected factors (developmental level, sex, reading ability, adult intervention, and variation in film content/form) on the ability of two age groups (nine and ten year old children and thirteen…

Oral language is used before written language, according to this paper, which contends that the acquisition of literacy is merely an extension of natural language learning for all children. This view of literacy development as natural is distinguished from the views of those that think language is innate; the naturalness of children learning to…

This study compared the rapid word processing abilities of groups of students in college, fourth grade, second grade, and kindergarten to see if there is a developmental pattern in such skill development, and to see if phonics training should emphasize either letters and the orthographic rules that create words or letter clusters (common words)…