Early Grade Reading Assessment for Primary School Students in Serang Banten

This article describes new strategies in teaching reading skills to primary school students based on the finding of Early Grade Reading Assessment instruments implemented in primary schools in Serang Banten, Indonesia. The authors describe the obtained results of the students’ skills in reading components. For example, we illustrate the proposed technique of teaching reading to primary school students. Our method shows that improvement in the students’ reading ability is moderate; the children are less able to recognize words; meaningless words are still hard to spell; and the students can understand the story well. The new strategy's effectiveness in evaluation is confirmed by calculating how the students recognize letters with a low reading speed of about 2.24 minutes for 100 letters. They could read 30 meaningful words in 3 minutes, but when reading something meaningless the students only read difficult 15 words in 15 minutes. General student reading was good at 86 percent, with only a few students who could not read the text. The students could understand 78 percent of the content of the reading by listening to the story and retelling the story orally. The children who were guided by parents or brothers or sisters had better reading skills. Another finding pertained to the availability of reading books besides textbooks for their reading sources. The new research results develop the students’ reading skills and can be used for developing the strategies in teaching student reading skills.