This report by the Comptroller General to the United States Congress discusses the review made of the Department of Education's National Diffusion Network, particularly its efforts to improve Title I reading programs through information dissemination on exemplary projects. Chapter one examines the Department of Education's dissemination…

This summary of the history and current workings of the New York Citywide reading test program emphasizes the educational consequences of it. The testing program has become controversial since its inception as a political compromise for school district decentralization. It seems to have become overly influential because children are prepared for…

This report evaluates Project Concern, a compensatory education program of the Hartford, Connecticut public schools, funded by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the State Act for Disadvantaged Children (SADC), and local compensatory education funds. The report analyzes participant selection procedures, describes program…

The relevance of psycholinguistic and educational research on passage structure and processing for the design of reading achievement tests is discussed. This research would provide a more objective basis for the writing of passages and items. Two aspects of content validity are distinguished and the relevance of psycholinguistic research to them…

In 1977, the Portland School District introduced a locally developed achievement testing program for Grades 3 through 8 in reading and mathematics. In 1979, language arts tests were added. These three test series comprise the Portland Achievement Levels Testing Program. The new tests were created by district personnel to measure student…

Word recognition and reading failure are examined in this report using an interactive framework of the reading process based on the premise that reading is both a top-down and a bottom-up process, both conceptually guided and graphically based. Experiments are discussed that show that less-skilled readers are affected by anomalous contexts and…

The effect on students' scores of different item formats used in standardized reading achievement tests was investigated. Thirty-one bilingual Mexican-American second grade students were given a phonics test using four different formats derived from three standardized reading achievement tests. The formats sampled identical content. A two-way…

The performance of 9, 13, and 17 year old public and private school students, in reading and mathematics, was compared by analyzing data collected during the National Assessment of Educational Progress 1977-78 mathematics and 1979-80 reading assessments. Although results were averaged for the national population, separate data is available not…

More than 5,000 reading miscues by 96 eighth and ninth graders were analyzed in a study designed to define specific relationships among cue use and to extend research based on Kenneth Goodman's psycholinguistic theory to the secondary level. The students read two easy and two difficult passages orally and answered questions based on them. Each…

A study was conducted to determine whether primary school children who were taught reading with an experimental modality prescriptive-diagnostic reading program achieved higher reading comprehension scores in the intermediate grades than did children who were taught reading with a traditional reading approach. The experimental group was composed…

The booklet summarizes finding involving over 6,300 youth in the New York State Program for Institutionalized Neglected and Delinquent Children. Four state agencies (the Education Department, the Division for Youth, the Department of Correctional Services, and the Office of Drug Abuse Services) are explained to have contributed data on…

In this study of children's memory, two types of presentation modes (pictures or words) were crossed with two levels of memory strategy ("make a picture in your mind" or "think of the word") to comprise four treatments: see picture/think picture, see picture/think word, see word/think picture, see word/think word. The study was conducted with 144…