The nature of the earliest stage of reading was examined by comparing two views about the importance of environmental print in children's learning experiences. One theory holds that environmental print leads to the acquisition of reading through developing rudimentary representations of specific words and logos, while the second theory concerns assembled phonology and asserts that reading begins with knowing letters and their sounds. Supporters of this theory hold that knowledge of environmental print and logos is reading the environment and may not directly facilitate the acquisition of word reading. Two studies were conducted with non-reading preschool children in which environmental print knowledge was assessed and related to word recognition training. In the first session of each study children were presented with accurate representations of environmental print and logos such as`McDonalds' and Stop' to find the ones they were able to identify and the ones they failed to identify. In the second session learning trials were conducted with those words from the logos that the children identified and also those that they failed to identify and with matching control words. Both studies found that the words from the known logos were more readily learned than the matching control words, but only in Study 1 were the known logo words learned more readily than the ones the children did not know. The results were discussed in terms of Gibson's (1969) theory of perceptual learning, and supported the view that environment print and logo knowledge facilitated word reading.
Using data from the Pennsylvania Early Adolescent Transitions Study (PEATS), a short-term longitudinal study of northwestern Pennsylvania adolescents undergoing the transition from elementary to junior high school, physical attractiveness (PA) and objective and subjective measures of academic competence were interrelated in order to test two alternative models: The direct effects model stresses intraorganism, noncontextually mediated links, while the developmental contextual model emphasizes social interactional processes between students and teachers. In support of the developmental contextual notion, the results of LISREL analyses across three times of testing during the sixth grade indicated that significant paths existed between PA and initial teachers' ratings of students' academic competence; in turn, these ratings were related to end-of-year grade point averages and to scores on a standardized achievement test. These findings are discussed in regard to alternative ways to model the role of social interactions in PA -academic competence relations and to the possible role of PA in early adolescent stress and coping.
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