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I've been reading with interest the discussion of Bohr's article on remedial reading courses and have finally read the article. As a former statistician I had some cautions as I read the article that fit with some of the comments our fellow LRNASSTers have been making. First, we need to be careful about how we interpret correlational studies when we couldn't assign students to the different instructional conditions. Even with statistical control (as was used here by using the pretest reading score in the analysis), we don't always know if we are really making the groups comparable.Based on this, and on my developmental reading students at Upsala College (NJ), I find Ted's comments well-taken: I have found repeatedly that the lowest level basic reading students are different in so many ways from students who take science, engineering, etc., or even the higher level of basic reading, that I could imagine that the learning curve for them would be very different. It would not be surprising, then, to see different rates of progress among students in different courses because they are really different populations of students. (I am thinking of variables such as conceptual maturity, metacognitive skills, motivation, as well as some possible learning disabilities.) The article contains some statements that could be taken as causal and given the difficulty of comparability we are hard put to say how muchthe progress the students made was the result of the courses they took and how much the result of the maturity that enabled hem to qualify for those courses in the first place. Still, it's good to raise the questions we are about what we are doing in developmental reading and how it could b e improved. Lonna's points about music and collaborative learning suggest that we might do well to move in the direction of some technique like reciprocal teaching of reading that stresses collaborative learning, students acting as teachers, and metacognitive thinking skills, and to use the more rigorous and thematic reading materials that we'd be more likely to use in paired courses than in isolated reading courses. Annette Gourgey