This study tested the validity and reliability of the West Informal Reading Evaluation (WIRE), an unobtrusive screening device that identifies adult learners' reading abilities. Of the 154 students in basic education or high school completion courses who completed one form of WIRE, 123 subjects were administered another reading test that served as…

The purposes of this study were: (1) to investigate the general interests and the reading interests of pupils in first grade through third grade and (2) to investigate teachers' skills in interpreting interest data and in choosing literature for children. The sample consisted of 521 pupils and 18 teachers. Reading interests of the children were…

Traditionally, reading instruction has emphasized the visual-sound correspondences in language. The illusion that words can be "sounded-out" letter by letter and word by word to produce meaning needs to be re-evaluated according to the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Some nonvisual aspects of reading which are…

In reevaluating issues involving the effective teaching of reading, this paper considers formal versus informal education, the pace of instruction, the difficulty of reading materials and the criteria that are used to match the text to the student, attention span and its relation to academic achievement, the effectiveness of instructional grouping…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has now completed two major assessments of reading. The first took place in the 1970-71 school year, the second during the 1974-75 school year. Both assessed the achievement of students aged nine, thirteen, and seventeen. This report focuses on the results of these two assessments, comparing changes…

In order to facilitate the design of a secondary reading program which would be creative and relevant in its structure and content, this descriptive study randomly sampled students from a population of approximately 600 suburban Illinois high school freshmen. The needs of these students were investigated by means of several perceptual inventories,…

This word list includes more than 43,000 items, each identified by a simple word meaning. For each item, the list provides a grade level (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, or 16) and a percentage score that indicates what percentage of students at that grade level understand the word. Each word-familiarity score was obtained by administering a three-choice…

Concluded that though auditory conceptualization is strongly related to reading, Spanish language interference with auditory conceptualization does not extend to reading skill. (RB)

A study explored the relationship of interest in story content, external incentives, and reading level to elementary school children's reading performance. The subjects, 75 fifth grade students who were either average or below-average readers, were asked to rate the content of five stories from "most" to "least" interesting and were then assigned…

A study was designed to investigate the auditory-visual integrative abilities of primary grade children for five long vowels and five short vowels. The Vowel Integration Test (VIT), composed of 35 nonsense words having all the long and short vowel sounds, was administered to students in 64 schools over a period of two years. Students' indications…

Most educators argue that the time children spend watching television detracts from their homework time and leisure time reading, that television watching cultivates skills different from those needed for print literacy and encourages preference for its easier means of acquiring information, and that television content is often nonintellectual and…

The research on teacher effectiveness that is reviewed in this paper focuses on teaching as behaving--the observable aspects of teaching--and teaching as thinking--the inner aspects of teaching. The section on teaching as behaving emphasizes the encouraging results of direct instruction (academically focused, teacher-directed classrooms using…