Chapter II: Background Abilities Related to Reading Success in First Grade

Chapter Two: Durrell as Research Leader

“…One of the outcomes of this study showed that differences did exist in favor of the girls. Nicholson (1957) showed that in all the per-ceptual, auditory, and kinesthetic abilities measured at the beginning of grade one, girls in the group were superior to the boys. However, Copaken (1965), in analyzing quantitatively the oral language of kindergarten children found no statistically significant differences between the total word count of boys and girls in kindergarten.…”

“…Gavel (1957) found that chronological age at school entrance correlated negatively with June achievement. Nicholson (1957) made an inventory of certain perceptual, auditory, and kinesthetic abilities in relation to letters and words to learn the retention capacities for sight words, and to relate these abilities to chronological age, mental age, and sex of first grade entrants. She discovered that chronological age had only a slight relationship to the specific abilities measured.…”

Daily Evaluation in the Classroom

“…, 1971) which indicate that normative tests, like IQ tests, are not particularly useful in indicating how a child will respond to teaching. A much better predictor is a measure of learning rate (Nicholson, 1958). Learning rate is partly the function of previous learning but, importantly for the teacher, it can be directly influenced by teacher intervention.…”

Letter Naming and Learning to Read

“…But even where it is not formally taught in initial reading many children came to the reading task already knowing some of the letter names. In a study by Nicholson (1958) Among those who favor the early introduction of letter names in reading instruction, there is little agreement on the specific benefits of this practice. One argument centers on attaching sounds to letters (Durrell, 1958); a second on the facilitation of letter discrimination (Fries, 1962), and a third on word identification (Olson, 1958;Muehl, 1962).…”

“…From the experiments reviewed earlier on tasks similar to letter naming, it might be argued.that names would aid letter discrimination either by reducing the psychological similarity of the forms (Gagna & Baker, 1950), or by providing a.more retrievable representation of the letter than its figural representation provides (Spiker, 1956)-But these arguments become academic when it is observed that most children at the beginning of first grade can match letters of the alphabet successfully, yet can, on the average, name only about onethird of them. Nicholson . (1958), for example, found that for 2,188 children tested at the beginning of first grade in the Bo' 'on area, the mean number of lower-case letters matched successfully was 24.48, while at the same time the mean for naming lower-case letters for the same population was 9.00.…”