A Language Arts Program for Pre-First- Grade Children: Two-Year Achievement Report.

DESCRIBES THE achievement of 36 subjects who participated in a two-year language arts program for pre-first-grade children. The goals and procedures of the program were based on findings from earlier studies of children who learned to read at home. The participants, more than half of whom came from blue-collar class backgrounds, were comprised of 20 boys and 16 girls who were divided into two classes. The group's mean I.Q. on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale was 113.6 with a standard deviation of 12.5. Achievement tests were administered at the end of the first and second years of the program. Second year testing showed that the subjects could identify an average of 123.8 words. On a 52-item test requiring identification of all the letters of the alphabet in both lower-case and capital forms, the subjects achieved a mean score of 49.7. The mean score on a numeral identification test (0-50) was 47.1. A sound test, requiring identification of the sounds of 22 letters, resulted in a mean score of 15.2. When the various kinds of achievement scores were correlated with I.Q., coefficients for the boys were considerably higher than those for the girls. In fact, the intelligence levels of the girls seemed relatively unimportant as predictors of how well they would do. When C.A. was considered, correlation coefficients for both boys and girls were small and never statistically significant.