DORSEY, MARY ELIZABETH.

Migrant children are one of the most educationally deprived groups of children in America. They include children from all ethnic groups: Black, White Mexican, Oriental and Indian, who lead a kind of transitory life that places great limitation on feelings of security and stability. Educators cannot control or dictate the mobility patterns of these children. But educators can design special programs and structure the learning environment so that the transitory life style of these children is less disruptive to their educational achievement. The problem involved in this study was to determine the effectiveness of a reading tutorial program designed and implemented for underachieving migrant students. The purposes of this study were to describe a model for designing and implementing a reading tutorial program and then to test the effectiveness of the program by assessing the reading gains made by participating migrant students. This study was limited to migrant students enrolled in five elementary schools located on the Southwestern coast of Florida in the agricultural belt. The review of literature focused on existing reading programs designed for migrant and other educationally deprived students. Most of the special reading programs that were researched indicated that educationally deprived children tend to increase in reading achievement when programs and materials are structured to accommodate their social, cultural and educational needs. In view of these studies, it was hypothesized that: Given the benefit of personalized and individualized instruction in a reading tutorial program, migrant students, grades two through five, would demonstrate a mean gain of one and one-half months' gain per twenty hours of instruction in reading achievement. The Silvaroli Classroom Reading Inventory was the instrument selected for the pretesting and posttesting of students because it has shown to correlate highly in judging the reading achievement of groups of individuals('1). This instrument was utilized to measure the reading gains by obtaining a gain score. The gain score ratio was computed by dividing the gain in months by the number of months of instruction received. Students attended tutorial sessions in groups of threes for approximately sixty minutes daily, five days a week. A diagnostic prescriptive technique was used, whereby each student was provided with one-to-one instruction, fifteen to twenty minutes each day. The results of the findings indicated that in terms of program effectiveness, the group of students, grades two through five, demonstrated a mean gain of 4.0 months' gain per month (twenty hours) in the program. The data collected clearly indicated that the tutorial concept, as organized and implemented, produced substantial improvement in reading skills with migrant students previously exhibiting reading deficiencies as measured by the Silvaroli Classroom Reading Inventory. ('1)Joe Peterson, M. Jean Greenlaw and Robert J. Tierney, "Assessing Instructional Placement with the IRI: The Effectiveness of Comprehension Questions," Journal of Educational Research (May/June, 1978):247-50