A Six Year Study of Children Who Learned to Read in School at the Age of Four.

REPORTS THE READING ACHIEVEMENT during grades 1-4 of children who participated in a 2-year, pre-first grade language arts program. It also compares their achievement with that of classmates who did not participate in the program but who had attended kindergartens in which some attention went to numeral and letter naming and to the development of a small reading vocabulary. For each of the 4 years, the reading achievement of experimental subjects exceeded that of the control group. With reading test raw scores as the experimental variable and intelligence-test raw scores as the covariate, an analysis of covariance indicated that the differences in grades 1 and 2 were large enough to be significant beyond the .05 level. In grades 3 and 4, this was not the case. For both experimental and control groups, correlation coefficients for reading achievement and chronological age were always small and non-significant. T-tests indicated that differences in intelligence test scores for the 2 groups of subjects were also non-significant.