The Reading Diary: Acquisition of Decoding

THE READING DIARY is an extensive case history of instructional environment and acquisition of reading skills by 50 first-graders in 10 classrooms. The design includes four categories of datadiagnostic decoding tests, oral reading and comprehension measures, standardized achievement tests, and classroom observations. Students' performance on multidimensional decoding tests indicates a consistent pattern of relative difficulty over levels of letter-sound correspondence, task-demands, and familiarity. The rate at which students mastered decoding depended on classroom instruction. Scatterplots of decoding and oral reading scores, oral reading and comprehension measures, and decoding scores and second-grade achievement scores revealed unique intraclass patterns of growth. The contrastive profiles indicate that beginning readers acquire those skills they are taught, that typical students from lower-income families tend to learn more when teaching is direct and structured, and that some skills (decoding) transfer to other skills (comprehension), but that the reverse is not true.