Children Who Learned To Read in Kindergarten: A Longitudinal Study.

what happens to children who learn to read in kindergarten? Do their non-early reading classmates catch up by the time they complete third grade? Do early readers become bored and disinter ested in reading as they progress through the early grades? Is an early acquisition of reading skill an asset or a handicap? Studies by Appleton (1964), Cohan (1961), Mayne (1963), and others have described ways by which very young children learned to read, but little is known concerning subsequent reading attitudes and achieve ment of these children. The research done by Durkin ( 1966) over a period of six years may be considered a most important contribution to the body of knowledge we have concerning the later achievement of children who read early. The Denver experiment as reported by Brzeinski (1964) has yielded important evidence arid promises more when the study is completed. Further evidence concerning later achievement of early read ers was uncovered by a study completed in Muncie, Indiana recently (Sutton, 1967). Here, 134 kindergarten children (of whom 105 remained to the end of the study) were given an opportunity to learn to read during the school year 1962-1963. The early stages of this experiment were reported in The Reading Teacher in Janu ary, 1964 and December, 1965. These reports contain a rather complete description of the unstructured reading activities which were offered in kindergarten, As the kindergarten year drew to a close, approximately sixty-six children were taking part in the informal reading activities on a more or less regular basis. Approxi mately sixty-eight children had not yet indicated more than passing interest in the reading activities. In April an objective measure ment of the reading proficiency resulted in the identification of forty-six children who scored at a level of 1.3 or higher on the Gat?s Primary Reading Achievement Test. The mean score for these forty-six pupils was 1.76, and two children achieved a read ing grade equivalent of 2.9, the highest score earned by any of the 595