The Annual Newsletter of the International Reading Association's Phonics Special Interest Group
Scientifically
Based Efficacy Research on Emergent Reading Skills
by Anne L. Fetter
Manager, Research
Leap Frog School House
Introduction
In recent years, the focus of politicians, policy makers, and educational
administrators has shifted back to basics: reading, writing and arithmetic.
The current climate of No Child Left Behind puts an emphasis on “adequate
yearly progress” and “data driven decision making.” As
a result, there is increasing pressure on educators to show that the methods
and curricula they have selected are best for increasing performance.
Early childhood education is also under scrutiny, as children are expected
to start kindergarten “ready to learn.” Even such organizations
as Head Start are being pushed towards higher standards of achievement.
Early literacy skills are one of the most important areas of focus for
early childhood educators; early literacy experts are calling for careful
attention to beginning reading in particular. Three important building
blocks of early literacy, in addition to being exposed to reading and
other literate behaviors in the home, are school-based programs in alphabetics,
phonemic awareness, and phonics.
Scientifically Based Research
The research basis that forms the foundation of educational programs should
be part of a cyclical and reciprocal process and should be examined in
conjunction with findings from scientifically-based validity and efficacy
research. The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse
(http://w-w-c.org/about.html), calls for research to be systematic, rigorous,
and open in design (inviting peers and professionals to examine one another’s
methodology and raw data).
The Literacy Center
This paper outlines one efficacy study on early literacy conducted using
The Literacy Center. The Literacy Center (TLC) is an interactive, multisensory
program that provides explicit, direct
instruction in early literacy skills including phonemic awareness and
phonics. The Literacy Center curriculum includes a teacher's manual consisting
of a 35-week curriculum for explicit, direct instruction in phonemic awareness
and phonics using all the electronic tools in TLC. Each module contains
detailed lesson plans and ongoing assessments. One tool, the LeapDesk‘
workstation speaks the names of letters of the alphabet and produces their
phonic pronunciations in the context of specific words. Students see and
feel the shapes of letters, then hear the letter names and sounds. The
writing pad lights up upper and lower case letters for tracing. Teachers
can print assessment reports for 40 students. The LeapMat‘ learning
surface teaches letter-name recognition, letter-sound association, and
spellings of three-letter words. The LeapPad® platform uses interactive
technology to have students read specific words, sound out decodable words,
and read entire pages. Students can hear the story along with the book,
touch words to hear them pronounced, touch individual phonemes to hear
the sound association, and drag the "electronic pen" across
the words to hear the sounds blend. TLC also includes interactive decodable
books and phonics skill cards, and colorful classroom posters that focus
on specific letter patterns. A music CD teaches phonemic awareness. Also
included were teaching strategies cards, letter neck cards, letter tiles,
sight word cards, and a flip card holder.
Pre-K Literacy Study
The School Readiness Language Development Program within the Los Angeles
Unified School District (LAUSD) participated in this research study designed
to measure the effectiveness of TLC. This was a pretest-posttest design,
cross-sectional efficacy study conducted during the entire 2001-2002 academic
year. Students’ early literacy skills were measured in the fall,
and after the intervention, in the spring. There were statistically significant
gains for those students who received the intervention
(a 74% gain in early literacy skills) compared to students in the control
group who received the standard district literacy materials (a 37% gain
in early literacy skills). Early literacy skills were measured through
letter-word identification (Woodcock Johnson III), blending sounds (Comprehensive
Test of Phonological Processing), and phonemic awareness (LeapDesk Assessment).
Sample
Three Los Angeles Unified School District schools with half-day pre-kindergarten
classrooms were selected by the district to participate in the program,
and three were selected to serve as controls. Forty-five percent (45%)
of the children were girls, and 55% were boys. There were 137 children
(68 treatment, 69 control) who participated in this study, and their average
age was 52.5 months at the beginning of September. Forty percent (40%)
of the children spoke English as their primary language and 10% were bilingual
in the fall. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of the children were Hispanic,
22% Caucasian, 12% African-American, and 6% Asian-American. The treatment
and control groups were matched by both age and gender as well as on all
pretest measures.
Method
The existing district-wide literacy program was Creative Curriculum. The
treatment group used TLC in addition to Creative Curriculum, while the
control group only used Creative Curriculum. Teachers were asked to implement
TLC for 60-90 minutes daily. Assessments were conducted one-on-one with
each child in English at three points throughout the school year (in October,
January, and May).
In order to determine the impact of the intervention as a supplemental
program, a battery of pre and post-tests was administered at the beginning
and end of the study. This battery of early literacy tests included the
Woodcock Johnson III (letter-word identification), the Comprehensive Test
of Phonological Processing (blending sounds), and a
LeapDesk assessment (phonemic awareness). An index of key reading skills
was computed by summing the raw skills for each of these three assessments
by child, both for pretest and posttest.
Results
Both groups showed statistically significant gains from pretest to posttest
(at a = .05). Pre- and posttest results on this composite index of key
reading skills demonstrate that students who received the intervention
performed 37% better (74% gain vs. 37% gain) on tests of key reading predictors
than students in the control group. This is illustrated in Figure A,
on page 6.
Conclusion
This LAUSD study found a statistically significant difference in
performance on key reading skills between the pre-kindergarten students
using TLC and Creative Curriculum and the
pre-kindergarten students who used only Creative Curriculum. Those children
who used TLC outperformed their peers by 37%. This finding, over one full
academic year, shows that the TLC intervention was effective in providing
early reading skills in to children in underserved neighborhoods.