Traditionally, children in low socioeconomic status (SES) inner-city areas in the United States lack experiences that prepare them for academic success, especially in math and science. The purpose of this research was to determine the extent to which a constructivist curriculum emphasizing logical thinking produces higher level thinking in low-SES…

To evaluate the usefulness of two DIBELS subtests (Phonemic Segmentation Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency), 107 kindergartners and 101 first-graders who had taken the DIBELS were given a writing-of-words task and the Slosson Oral Reading Test of sight words. In addition, the 1st-graders' DIBELS included an Oral Reading Fluency subtest that…

Examined English-speaking preschoolers' level of writing and their performance on oral-segmentation tasks. Found a close relationship between children's levels of writing and their levels of oral segmentation on a writing task in which they were asked to write four pairs of words, for example, "ham" and "hamster." Concluded…

Examined strategies used by 12 kindergarten nonreaders who tried to relate spoken words to segments of written sentences. Results suggest that children may first succeed in establishing correspondences between temporal order of spoken words and spatial order of written words when a sentence contains only one functor word. Results show the complex…

Examined children's notions about segments of written sentences. Subjects watched a sentence being written and listened to it being read. The interviewer then asked questions about each word--whether or not it was written and, if so, where. Found that children used word order before phonics to figure out what was written in each segment of the…

Examined four times throughout the school year kindergartners' writing of four word pairs. Found that children generally began writing more letters unconventionally for longer words than for shorter before they began writing the same letters unconventionally for the same sounds. Concluded that the word pairs could identify children who have become…

Compared the longitudinal effects of phonics and whole-language instruction on kindergartners' reading and writing task performance over one year. Found that the whole-language group made more progress in reading and writing, and with more developmental coherence, than the phonics group. (JPB)