This applied research project consisted of three interrelated strands of inquiry concerning the performance of students in two Tallahassee high schools on the first two administrations of the Florida Functional Literacy Test (F.L.T.). A quasi-experiment of the remedial programs provided for the failers of the 1977 F.L.T. was conducted using two dependent variables: F.L.T. percent correct and total reading score from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (W.R.M.T.). Results found that remediation led to significant improvements in F.L.T. performance but not in basic reading ability. / An analysis of the amount of gain in F.L.T. test scores between the two testing sessions which can be attributed to regression to the mean was also conducted. This analysis showed that up to 10 percentage points of F.L.T. improvement can be attributed to regression; and that a considerable number of remedial students will pass the F.L.T. on their second attempt because of this artifact. / Those students who passed the F.L.T. by a narrow margin (ten raw score points or less) were found to be reading at a 4.6 grade level. Those students who failed on their first attempt were reading at the 3.5 grade level. All groups showed similar gain in reading skills during the study; at the reading posttest the remedial students were reading at a 3.9 grade level; well below the pretest mean for the near passers. Despite this lack of growth in reading, all but 5 of 42 remedial students passed the second F.L.T. Considerable overlap between the groups in the distribution of reading abilities was also reported. / The concurrent validity of the F.L.T. was estimated as .63 based on the pretest correlation between it and the W.R.M.T. The overall test-retest correlation for the F.L.T. was .61 which can be considered acceptable given the one year delay between testing sessions. The classification reliability of the F.L.T. was estimated as .85 for borderline passers and .95-1.00 for the rest of the near passer continuum. / The reading achievement histories of these two groups of students, and a third which passed the F.L.T. by a safe margin, were described after a search of each student's cumulative record folder. As early as the end of the second grade, the mean reading level from the C.T.B.S. of the eventual safe passers was significantly better than that of the eventual failers. The near passers and failers did not reliably diverge in mean reading ability until the end of the fifth grade. The relative deficiency in reading ability reported for the failers arose from three time periods in their educational history. These periods were: prior to the third grade; during the fifth grade; and the period between the end of the seventh and the end of the tenth grades. The reading achievement of the failers was found to be the most stable of all three groups. This was due to the rarity of these students ever rising above the 30th percentile of the normative population. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-03, Section: A, page: 1003. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74147 |
| Contributors | FAIRBANKS, DAVID LARRY., The Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 110 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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