This report describes a pilot study conducted to evaluate the instructional effectiveness of the Steck-Vaughn Phonics Program: Level A-Units 3 and 4 and Level B-Units 2 and 3. The Educational Research Institute of America (ERIA) identified volunteer teachers to participate, designed the assessments, and analyzed the collected data. Because the focus was on the program's primary levels, it was limited to Grades 1 and 2; Level A-Units 3 and 4 were used in first grade, while Level B-Units 2 and 3 were used in second grade. These units, selected by the teachers to best fit their schools' reading objectives at the time, included the teaching of eight initial consonants, six final consonants, short vowels, long vowels, and vowel diagraphs. A quasi-experimental pretest posttest design was used; 18 first and second grade teachers in California, Illinois, and Florida volunteered to participate. Approximately 400 students were included. Teachers administered the phonics tests developed by ERIA as pretests, taught the designated units from the Steck-Vaughn program, and administered the posttests after completing instruction. All assessments were scored by hand at ERIA. Results indicated that: (1) after about three weeks of instruction, two groups of first and second graders increased pretest scores to posttest scores a statistically significant amount on 5 out of 6 subtests and on total test scores for both the first and second grade assessments; (2) an analysis of students who scored lowest on the pretest indicated much greater improvement than was shown for the entire group--more than twice as great; (3) on the single subtest (second grade) where there was not a statistically significant improvement, there was evidence of a "ceiling" effect; and (4) all the teachers reported they were able to use the Steck-Vaughn Phonics Program without problems. Contains 5 tables of data. (NKA)

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