A study was conducted to construct a cloze screening instrument to gain information about the reading capabilities of college students enrolled in specific courses and to find out what support services these students needed. Subjects included 464 college students ranging from entering freshmen to graduate students. Cloze passages were constructed…

The District of Columbia Public Schools' Special Education Television Reading Program was a one-year program designed to improve reading skills and achievement through the use of intrinsically motivating materials and activities and to serve as a vehicle for students to move from special environments to the mainstream of regular education.…

This is a mid-project report which describes the accomplishments of the Local School Development Project of the New York Urban Coalition, a group which collaborated with the New York City school system through Spring, 1981. The report reviews the Project's efforts to aid in students' academic, intellectual and human development in elementary and…

A study was conducted to replicate earlier findings regarding the relationships between letter, word, and text reading times and measures of reading achievement and to establish the stability of reading times measures and their relationships over a one-year period. Subjects included 150 children in eight age cohorts between grades one and six. The…

A study was conducted in three city school districts in eastern North Carolina to examine the relationship between the organizational climate of elementary schools and the reading achievement of third grade students. The Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire was given to the staff of ten elementary schools to determine whether the…

Results are reported from the second year of a longitudinal evaluation of Child Parent Centers (CPC's) serving low-income urban children. Six-year-old participants and nine-year-old former participants and comparison groups were analyzed on measures including reading and mathematics achievement, internal-external control belief, and…

Nine elementary schools enrolling 852 sixth grade students participated in a study that examined the relationship between the organizational climate of elementary schools (whether the school was "open" or "closed") and the reading achievement of students. Each school's organizational climate was determined by administering the Organizational…

Five tables of data from the three surveys conducted during the 1970s by the National Assessment of Educational Progress are presented in this paper, with an interpretation of them regarding reading improvement. The paper provides comparative data from schools eligible and noneligible for Title I assistance across the following variables: age,…

A study was conducted to determine the influence of a holistic versus a phonic approach in beginning reading on children's comprehension scores at the end of grade two. Two groups, each of approximately 350 students, were studied. Group one began reading instruction in first grade using the "Early-to-Read i.t.a. Program" (initial teaching…

The purpose of this paper is to make classroom teachers on all educational levels aware of the limitations of readability formulas and the factors affecting readability that are not accounted for by the readability formulas. delineated in discussions of readability formula assumptions, problems, and limitations. Some of the specific factors that…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationships between the cognitive variables of cognitive style, understanding of linguistic concepts, and knowledge of word boundaries, as well as their relationships to three measures of reading in beginning and more advanced readers. The children's Embedded Figures Test, a linguistic concept test, a…

Forty low-achieving seventh and eighth grade students were involved in a study to ascertain whether intelligence, underachievement, or the difference between aural and sight vocabularies could predict relative learning rate with respect to reading achievement gains. For purposes of the study, "relative learning rate" was defined as the ratio of…

Criticism of the American public school has abounded since its inception. Among the favorite indictments of the mid-1970s is the alleged failure of the public school to adequately teach fundamental skills. This book is intended to help the reader assess contemporary attacks on public schools in an intelligent and responsible manner. It draws on a…

To investigate the effectiveness of the "The Holt Basic Reading System, 1977" in a variety of schools that had used the system for one or two years, a four-part field study was devised that involved selecting demographic data on the participating schools, assessing the judgments and ideas of the school administrators in regard to the…

This report describes a study of the use of social reinforcement to increase the industriousness, and subsequently the reading competence, of children in the kindergarten through third grade classes of the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) demonstration school. Teacher behaviors, pupil industriousness, and pupil reading performance were…