The West Virginia Department of Education created and implemented a computer-assisted summer remediation program for Job Training Partnership Act-eligible students who were academically deficient. The curriculum had four components: mathematics computation, reading comprehension, personal guidance, and career exploration. Sites in 12 county school…

A study evaluated the IBM Principles of Adult Literacy (PALS) program in 1988-89. Three adult education centers in Georgia (two with PALS and one without) were studied to determine whether, for adult nonreaders, the PALS program produced gains in reading equal to or greater than those produced by a traditional noncomputerized program. In addition…

A practicum was designed to increase the amount of time parents read to their kindergarten children. Fifteen parents in a suburban area participated in a series of teacher-presented workshops to discover the value of reading aloud, learn strategies for presenting literature, and practice reading aloud to their children. All seven of the behavioral…

This color-coded guide/catalog was prepared as a resource for adult educators through a Montana project that evaluated computer software for teaching basic skills to adults. The guide is divided into three parts. Part I consists of the results of the assessment and evaluation of 119 pieces of software currently being used at 16 adult basic…

Based on the hypothesis that teachers' naturally occurring presentations of storyreading have an effect on children's literacy learning, a study examined whether teachers can be trained to provide a structure for listening to stories and whether this type of presentation would result in significant gains in children's story understanding. Five…

Containing selections of the papers presented at the 1984 and 1985 annual meetings of the North Central Reading Association, this yearbook includes sections on research; reviews of research; professional issues; and program descriptions. Papers include: "Twenty-Five Years of Professional Progress" (James E. Walker); "A Study of Student Alienation…

A study compared the performances of adults who were learning to read with those of two groups of preliterate and second-grade children on selected cognitive tasks and on the display of certain metacognitive understandings. It was hypothesized that if the adults (who could not successfully read a passage from a fourth-grade reader) did as well as…

The evaluation process and results asociated with 1989-1990 reading (kindergarten through grade 12) and language arts (kindergarten through grade 5) programs of the Des Moines (Iowa) Independent Community School District are presented. The evaluation is divided into four parts: context; input; process; and product. Language arts instruction…

This guide was developed to provide adult education teachers in Arkansas with a listing of competencies correlated with appropriate materials at each level. The guide helps teachers select materials to individualize student instructional plans. It provides a variety of alternatives such as books, workbooks, software, video, and suggested reading…

West Virginia Northern Community College provided workplace literacy education and training for employees of Weirton Steel Corporation and Union Carbide Corporation. For Weirton Steel the training included 4,040 hours of instruction in fundamental literacy skills (reading, writing, speaking, and math), oral and written communications (including…

This study examined the relationship between teacher and student understandings. Subjects consisted of 26 third-grade students, of whom six were chosen for case studies, in a school in a large metropolitan area. All students were Latino, bilingual, and from working class homes. Modified cloze lessons were taught, and three types of data were…

Designed to add to the existing knowledge base concerning the saliency of features used by children to identify isolated words, a study examined whether the method of instruction influences the extent to which various features are used for word identification and recall. Subjects, 117 kindergarten students from a suburban Buffalo, New York, school…

Focusing on the effects of three interventions on students' reading and writing of persuasive discourse, a study investigated (1) whether the writing of persuasive discourse can be improved by instruction, and (2) the effect of reading on writing and of writing on reading within the persuasive mode. Subjects, 100 Canadian sixth graders stratified…

Intended to help teachers decide which books to start with when incorporating children's literature into the reading program and to show them how to use these books with a variety of readers, this book provides a rationale and guidance for using "real books" to teach reading. Titles and authors of the articles included are as follows: (1)…

Teachers must make sure that the right book gets to the right child at the right time in order to develop positive reading habits. However, once a book is selected, students should be encouraged to think about what they are reading and use the story to evaluate and enrich their personal knowledge. Two classroom programs that use the whole language…