The purpose of this practicum was to implement and evaluate a peer tutoring program designed to raise the reading level of a selected group of low-achieving students at Harry Stone Middle School, an all-black, sixth- and seventh-grade school in the Dallas, Texas, Independent School District. Objectives were twofold: to raise the grade-equivalent…

Of the 47,000 bilingual pupils enrolled in the Chicago public schools, 39,000 were Spanish speaking. Many of these Spanish speaking students were in special bilingual programs. The success of one of these bilingual programs was evaluated by comparing two groups of Mexican American elementary pupils in the same school. One group was comprised of 14…

Reviews studies which demonstrate that exposure to children's literature encourages verbal language development and reading competence in particular. (TJ)

Compares word-attack and comprehension skill mastery of 65 native Spanish-speaking upper elementary students in a bilingual English/Spanish program and 55 native Spanish-speaking students of the same grade levels in an English monolingual program. There was no significant difference in the word-attack skills of the two groups but the bilingual…

Describes a study indicating statistically significant differences between the two groups of intellectually superior four- and five-year-olds in the areas of story recall and print awareness, and that the accelerated readers of this age group tend to have mothers who have deliberately provided their children with reading instruction. (HTH)

Four experiments examined the spelling capability of students in grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and college. Results suggested that reading unit size increases with age and reading ability. Younger children, like adults, unitize common words, and unitization of less common words increases as word configurations become more familiar. (RWB)

Evaluates an individualized reading program in which elementary school teachers prepared written prescriptions for students, targeting specific deficiencies for remediation. Finds that among students, preferences for independent modes of learning are significant predictors of positive reading attitudes. (MM)

This discussion of assessing students' reading abilities focuses on the need for developing better tests and better interpretation of test scores. Criterion-referenced tests versus norm-referenced tests are described, highlighting the Degrees of Reading Power and Metropolitan Achievement Tests: Reading, and the need for assessing the reading…

Based on response categories of the Classroom Activity Recording Form, instructional behaviors of 30 teachers of mildly retarded and learning disabled elementary students (N=122) were used to predict reading achievement gain on the California Achievement Test. Time spent in teacher questioning was the single best predictor of achievement gain.…

Retrospective examination of primary graders' (N=34) preschool performance on a predictive instrument and its relationship to primary school reading achievement found that those judged as needing (and who took) another year of preschool were reading significantly better than others who displayed similar developmental anomalies but did not take…

Examines the ability of 30 normal and 30 learning disabled children across a three-year period to understand a sequence of instructions, communicate the steps in a sequence to others, and rephrase their verbal messages through a referential communication task. (HOD)

To probe the association of reading achievement with factors in learning, the scores of 2,890 13-year-old students from a National Assessment of Educational Progress sample were regressed on 24 indexes of the factors, singly and as a set. Achievement showed diminishing or eventually negative returns to eight time variables. (Author/BS)

Decoding and comprehension skills were assessed for Turkish and American first and third graders. Twenty students in each group were tested on a pseudoword vocalization task and on a paragraph comprehension task. The data suggest that languages with more regular letter-sound correspondences lead to faster acquisition of decoding skills. (Author/BS)

The concurrent and discriminant validity of La Prueba de Analisis Auditivo, a Spanish auditory perception test, and the validity of the perceptual deficit hypothesis and of hypotheses derived from verbal processing theory were evaluated in a sample of 114 second-grade Hispanic pupils receiving reading instruction in Spanish. (Author/BW)

Examines the relationship of achievement in reading, spelling, and arithmetic with a variety of other measures, including tests of visual memory and visual-motor association. Concludes that visual association is more closely related to achievement in reading, arithmetic, and spelling than is visual memory. (HOD)