The Effective Teacher of Reading.

Abstract

in our attempts to improve reading instruction we have had hun dreds of studies of the characteristics of pupils, and scores of studies in which instructional programs and materials have been analyzed or compared, but there have been surprisingly few studies of the teacher's contribution?of the teacher characteristics that make for successful learning, or of specific forms of teacher behavior that are associated with good and poor pupil learning in the reading program. Quite familiar to IRA members are the cooperative studies of primary grade reading which began with twenty-seven federally assisted first-grade projects in 1964-65. Half continued through sec ond grade, and six followed their pupils through third grade. Indi vidual project summaries have appeared in The Reading Teacher, and the lengthy reports from the Coordinating Center have been published in the Reading Research Quarterly. These studies, taken together, form the largest-scale comparative investigation of begin ning reading instruction yet made. One of the most important con clusions of the Coordinating Center's first-grade report was stated as follows: