Early Grade Reading

This study, conducted in the United Arab Emirates, piloted a curriculum to increase early grade reading fluency. A curriculum with enhanced perceptual features, such as font size and spacing was used with grade one students in four schools to detect any significant difference in students' reading speed and reading accuracy after one year. Three hundred forty-five grade one students participated in the pilot-174 in the intervention group and 171 in the control group (ds= 0.33 0.47). At the end of the year, students in the intervention group read more letters and words correctly on average in one minute (p < .01) and in an entire text (p < .01 for letters; p < .001 for words) than those in the control group. These results suggest that curriculum with perceptual enhancement may be useful in facilitating early Arabic reading fluency. ‫اﻟﻤﻠﺨﺺ‬

This study aims to answer questions about the condition of early reading skills II grade students with mental retardation in the second semester SDLB-D1 YPAC Surakarta. This research was conducted on six students. Data was collected by observation technique and tests. The results showed that the ability to read the beginning of the children is very low. From the six students who are subject to a new research only one children who can read, three children are recognize letters and two children know a few letters.

We have found that if access is provided to carefully chosen and age appropriate books for children, space is designated in school for these books, and if children access these books everyday for reading (as in having one compulsory period every day for every class), if teachers are trained in the basics, if children get to form a library management group and manage the library on their own, and if some school monitoring happens, things can definitely look up over time, even in difficult situations like in Narayanpur district, Chhattisgarh! Read on...

Teachers start his/her ninety-minute class with the everyday lesson with Phonemic Awareness activities like sound recognition, blending syllables into words and segmenting words into syllables. Then they gradually move to Phonics activities like introducing letter, its corresponding sound and possible words that it comes with. In addition, they involve students in stroke writing, syllables (Brahakhari) reading, word reading and reading a short decodable text. Moving onto the next component of Vocabulary, teachers introduce the vocabulary before presenting a decodable text/story. They introduce three new words with proper pronunciation, meaning and use in a sentence. Then the students are asked to read the text/story to improve their reading Fluency followed by necessary support and model reading from the teacher. Then to assess the reading Comprehension, teachers use factual and inferential questions. Finally, to test the students reading and writing skill, teachers use dictation technique.

This paper contributes to the research agenda on intervention studies and their impact on learning outcomes. It focuses on early grade mathematics in South Africa by drawing on four years of cross-sectional data (n = 5,724) from treatment and control primary schools in the same district in Gauteng. Early Grade Mathematics Assessments (EGMA) were administered to a random selection of learners in both school groups over a period of 4 years.

Findings show a statistically significant difference in mean attainment on the EGMA assessment in the JumpStart schools (effect size of 0.52) and with further improvements evident after 3 years (effect size of 0.94). These effect sizes are compared to existing South African studies as well as meta-analysis of studies from low- and middle-income countries. Benchmarks for EGMA raw score attainment at Grade level in the Ekurhuleni South district of Gauteng (n = 2,625) are provided.

Early success in reading is the key to long-term success in school and in lifelong learning. Children who successfully learn to read in the early primary years of school are well prepared to read for learning and for pleasure in later years. Primary school children in Bangladesh are expected to master reading skills by the time they complete their primary level. In fact, the curriculum expectations are that they should be fluent in reading in Bangla by the end of grade II. It has been, however, observed reading in Bangla with comprehension begins to occur only by grade IV or later. This study reports about reading skills and characteristics of grade III students of 10 primary schools in Nikli upazilla of Kishoreganj district. Reading assessment was conducted with a questionnaire based on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) tools developed by RTI International. The interviewed children demonstrated high average letter naming knowledge, but lower word reading skills, and even lo...

ABSTRACT The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three-hundred-fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified at four linguistic levels, and multiple computerized operationalizations were created for each of the 22 text characteristics. A researcher-devised text-complexity outcome measure was based on: teacher judgment of text complexity in the 350 texts; and text complexity as gauged from student responses using a maze task for a subset of the 350 texts. Analyses were conducted using a logical analytical progression typically used in machine-learning research. Random forest regression was the primary statistical modeling technique. Nine text characteristics were most important for early-grades text complexity including word structure (decoding demand and number of syllables in words), word meaning (age of acquisition, abstractness, and word rareness), and sentence and discourse-level characteristics (intersentential complexity, phrase diversity, text density/information load, and non-compressibility). Notably, interplay among text characteristics was important to explanation of text complexity, particularly for subsets of texts.