The purpose of this study was to assess and compare the judgments of elementary classroom teachers and college and university reading professors with regard to what should be included and stressed in undergraduate level reading methods courses.The instrument developed to gather pertinent data consisted of thirty-eight items which were grouped under the six major categories utilized by the International Reading Association. Each respondent marked on a line continuum the degree of emphasis he judged each item should receive and the response was later translated into a numerical value with nine being the highest rating and one the lowest rating.A random sample of forty public elementary schools in Marion County, Indiana gave the researcher a possible one hundred sixty elementary classroom teacher respondents. A stratified random sample of the Indiana colleges and universities appearing on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education list yielded twenty-two college and university reading professors. Since each person's participation was purely voluntary, the ninety-five percent return by elementary classroom teachers and a ninety-one percent return by college and university reading professors was considered satisfactory.A one way analysis of variance was computed on the data gathered for each instrument item to obtain an F ratio for the test of significance. The mean obtained on each instrument item by a certain respondent group was also used to place the topics on a rank order scale.Based on the results of the investigation, it was concluded and recommended that:1. Both lower and upper elementary classroom teachers would profit from reading courses dealing with the total reading spectrum rather than having separate reading courses for each of the above noted groups.2. Suburban teachers in this particular geographical area desired more emphasis in undergraduate reading methods courses on techniques for evaluation of a child's progress and how to foster a child's interest in reading.3. The number of years of teaching experience did not influence the teacher’s judgment concerning the content of an undergraduate reading methods course.4. The highest academic degree obtained by teachers in this populous Indiana county did make a difference in how important the instrument items were perceived. Master Degree teachers had a greater awareness of the individual needs of children.5. Currently, it would seem that Indiana college and university reading professors stress knowledge of the total reading program throughout the elementary school and knowledge of types of prereading readiness experiences to a greater degree than elementary classroom teachers believe they need. On the other hand, elementary classroom teachers in Marion County, Indiana would like college and university reading professors to increase the emphasis on how to use audio visual aids in reading, how to foster interest in reading, and how to teach reading through a variety of mass media.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Alternate Visual Formats (AVFs) would cause a significant difference in the subjects' comprehension as compared to their comprehension of a passage in the Traditional Visual Format (TVF). The study used an equal number of male and female subjects that were as homogeneous as possible in terms of: grade levelreading levelsocio-economic statusgeneral academic achievementThe difference in comprehension was measured by having the subjects answer a set of eight multiple choice questions immediately following their reading of each of the three passages. The passages were taken from-,a commercially published Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) and two had their printed formats each modified to a different AVF. The set of questions that were used with each passage came from an initial. pool of twenty-four. This pool was created by modifying the published IRI questions to a multiple choice format and constructing additional questions for each passage. A pilot study was conducted; a point biserial analysis was used to select the questions which were subsequently used in the study. The results of the subjects' performance on these questions were then analyzed.Two methods of analysis were employed to analyze the data. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to determine whether there was any difference in the subjects' comprehension due to format, sex, or a combination of these factors. The results of this analysis revealed that there was a significant difference in the subjects' comprehension due to format (F= 27.05 at 0.0000 probability). This analysis further indicated that there was no significant difference found when the comprehension of the male and female subjects was compared (F = 1.81 at 0.1894 probability). Neither was there any significant comprehension of a particular form by a particular sex (F = 0.12 at 0.8854 probability). The only significant difference in comprehension was found to be due to form. The second method of analysis was the Newman Keuls procedure which yielded results that showed the subjects were able to comprehend the TVF passage significantly (beyond the .01 level) better than either of the AVF passages. There was no significant difference between the mean scores of the AVF passages.These findings indicate that the AVFs as used in this study both acted to impede the subjects' comprehension to a significant degree. This impediment in comprehension appeared, In this study, to be due to the formats which were used. The findings suggest that printed formats that differ to a greater or lesser degree from a TVF may act to significantly interfere with comprehension.

Review of literature revealed: (1) teachers are a most vital factor in reading instruction, (2) teachers evince weakness in a variety of competencies necessary to effective reading instruction, (3) inadequacies are often traced to the courses included in teacher preparation, (4) meager efforts have been made to evaluate methods courses due to inadequacies in existing instrumentation, and (5) construction of pilot instruments based on situational tasks measuring teacher competence in solving problems related to reading instruction have been undertaken.This study sought to apply existing instrumentation to the measurement of the effectiveness of certain reading methods courses in development of selected teacher competencies.

This study compared the effects of ReQuest, a reciprocal questioning procedure, and the Directed Reading Activity (DRA) on the reading comprehension of average reading achievers in the fourth grade. Fifty-seven subjects from two schools were assigned randomly to two treatments, a ReQuest group and a DRA group. Each treatment group was subdivided into four instructional groups containing seven or eight subjects. Each instructional group received one-half hour of reading instruction outside the regular classroom for twenty-three days.Each of two trained teachers instructed two ReQuest groups and two DRA groups using scripts based on the reading textbook employed in both schools. In the preparation-forreading segment of the lesson the subjects in'-the ReQuest group asked the teacher questions about the first sentence of the story and the teacher reciprocated with additional questions. This procedure was repeated for each sentence until the subjects were able to predict the content of the story or the first two paragraphs had been covered. In contrast, the DRA group followed the procedure indicated in the teacher's manual of the reading textbook. Silent reading time was controlled and the preparation-for-reading and postreading discussion times were measured.The Comprehension subtest of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests served as the pretest-posttest measures. Gain scores were utilized in a 2 x 2 analysis of covariance in which the factors were the teachers and treatments with preparation-for-reading and postreading-discussion time as the covariate. In addition, the proportion of correct answers given by the students to questions posed by the teachers after silent reading were summed for each week to serve as six repeated measures in a 2 x 2 x 6 analysis of covariance. The treatments and schools were the other factors with the covariate being preparation-for-reading time. In both of these analyses there were no significant differences between the schools or between the ReQuest and DU groups in reading comprehension performance. A post hoc analysis of proportions resulted in no significant difference between treatment groups with regard to their ability to answer factual or inferential questions.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2003. / Adviser: Maryanne Wolf. Submitted to the Dept. of Child Development. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-190). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ed. Spec.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Washington, 1988. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [100]-115.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1964. / Bibliography: leaves 108-110.