etadd_47(3) - Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities

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TABLE 7 Means for WJIII DRB Pretest and Posttest Scores with Estimated Age and Grade Equivalencies Measures Synthetic (n 17) Analogy (n 18) Control (n 17) Mean Age 9.42 8.06 8.52 Letter-Word Identification Pretest 14.59 15.28 13.824 (6-1/K.8) (6-1/K.8) (6-0/K.7) Postest 16.24 16.78 14.06 (6-2/K.8) (6-3/K.9) (6-0/K.7) Word Attack Pretest 1.83 1.67 1.78 (5-8/K.2) (5-8/K.2) (5-1/K.0) Postest 4.12 3.61 2.29 (6-9/1.4) (6-9/1.4) (5-8/K.2) detected on the variables of age. There was insufficient data to account for these differences. Discussion Significant effects were found on the measure of training word identification for both the synthetic and analogy phonics treatment groups compared to the control group, indicating that participants who received a systematic approach to phonics instruction outperformed those students who did not. No significant effects were found between the adjusted means of the two groups which received phonics instruction suggesting that neither approach was superior in increasing the number of words the participants could read. Significant effects were also found on transfer word identification for the synthetic phonics treatment groups compared to the control group. No significant effects were found on transfer word identification for the analogy phonics treatment group compared to the control group. These results imply that participants in the synthetic phonics treatment group were better able to apply the decoding skills they had learned during the intervention to words they were unfamiliar with, and support the findings of Waugh et al. (2009) where participants with intellectual disability were able to read novel words with a similar structure to those taught in the course of the study. However, no significant effects were found between the synthetic phonics treatment group and the analogy treatment group which suggests that either there are no additive effects to synthetic phonics instruction or that differences between the groups could not be detected due to either small sample size or the relatively brief length of the intervention. The synthetic phonics approach may have been more effective in teaching generalized decoding skills for a number of reasons. The approach emphasized the alphabetic code, introducing one letter at a time rather than a segment of a word. Participants could track each letter in a word and sound it out rather than having to recognize segments of word by sight. Slowly introducing one concept at a time may have been a beneficial aspect of this approach especially to children with significant cognitive disability who learn at a slower rate than typically developing children. Participants in this study were only required to read short one-syllable words, three to five letters long. The brevity of the words could also be a factor in participants’ success. For many years sight word instruction has been the favored method of reading instruction for children with significant cognitive disability. This study suggests that children with significant cognitive disability are able to benefit from systematic phonics instruction. The analogy phonics approach which more closely resembles sight word instruction was not shown to be as effective as the synthetic phonics approach. No significant differences were found between groups for either the measure of Letter- 276 / Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities-September 2012
Word Identification or Word Attack on the WJIII DRB. Comparisons of pretest and posttest means revealed that participants’ scores in the synthetic and analogy phonics treatment groups did improve significantly. On Word Attack all three treatment groups showed significant gains in the means of their pretest and posttest scores. This would suggest that the classroom instruction the participants in the control group received allowed them to make adequate progress. This is inconsistent with findings in the main analysis which suggest that systematic phonics instruction was more effective in teaching children to read new words. It is possible that the gains could have been made due to internal threats such as practice effects of testing or maturation of the participants. The sudden increases in age and grade level equivalences on Word Attack may have been due to the fact that participants were receiving explicit instruction in a skill they had not been taught before, and they were applying this skill to their existing knowledge of letters and words. Limitations of the Study Although the results of this study suggest the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction, homogeneity of the sample cannot be assumed. There may be factors related to the schools in this study that may differentiate them from other schools. It was not practical to analyze data to determine if differences existing between classes, age groups or reading programs concurrently used all of which could have influenced the results. A longer intervention period may have yielded clearer differences between the treatments groups if in fact they did exist, reducing the likelihood of a Type II error. Allor et al. (2010) showed more significant results in the effectiveness of their phonic based reading intervention, which was conducted over a two year period. The WJIII DRB may not have been sensitive enough to detect variation between the participants’ performance and progress resulting in an analysis that found no significant differences between treatment groups on standardized measures. Finally, this study used an experimental design to compare differences between groups. Experimental designs are valuable in that they allow us to find the most effective interventions for a group. Their limitation lies in that their results focus on the overall group benefits. With low-incidence populations, exceptionality is not unusual and this study showed that some participants were unresponsive to the intervention in that they did not make gains on either training word identification or transfer word identification. Parsing out these data is necessary to understand individual differences within the sample and to guide decisions on designing educational programs that are individualized and fit the needs of each child. Implications for Practice Evidence that systematic phonics design is beneficial to children with significant cognitive disability has implications for curricular design and for teacher training. The researcher found that participants maintained their interest in the learning activities during the intervention. The participants received one-to-one instruction and were rewarded with a sticker for their participation and effort. The sessions were short in length and there were a high number of opportunities for participants to interact with and respond to the learning materials. The materials were designed so that they were easy to read, easy to manipulate, and appealing to look at. These factors may have contributed to the success of the study. The training and transfer words for the study were chosen because they corresponded to the high frequency words found in the Dolch (1948) sight word list. It is important to acknowledge that children with significant cognitive disability may have a limited capacity to store and retrieve words, and care must be taken when designing curricula to ensure that students’ unique needs are met. The participants also received one-on-one instruction. This has implications for policy on the ratio of teachers to students in classrooms where children with significant cognitive disability are placed. Implications for Further Research There are many questions that still need to be answered in addressing how best to teach chil- Effects of Systematic Phonics / 277
Page 1 and 2: Education and Training in Autism an
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Page 9 and 10: discussions were held with 12 addit
Page 11 and 12: TABLE 1 A Sample of Community Funds
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Page 17 and 18: Browder, D. M., & Cooper-Duffy, K.
Page 21 and 22: of words, and in the short term wer
Page 23 and 24: TABLE 3 Word Lists List No. Trainin
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Page 33 and 34: TABLE 1 Target Vocabulary Words by
Page 35 and 36: Figure 1. Example of PowerPoint Sli
Page 37 and 38: TABLE 3 Mean Percentage of Correct
Page 39 and 40: Figure 4. Jake’s percentages corr
Page 41 and 42: man-Martin et al. (2005) by demonst
Page 45 and 46: used in the study that did not foll
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Page 53 and 54: Accordingly, recent research has in
Page 55 and 56: Method Participants Four male child
Page 57 and 58: TABLE 2 Play Scale - Developmental
Page 59 and 60: elated utterances, which were used
Page 61 and 62: Figure 1. Ian’s Progress in Play
Page 63 and 64: Figure 3. Ryan’s Progress in Play
Page 65 and 66: Figure 5. Social Validity: Average
Page 67 and 68: (2000). A comparison of video model
Page 71 and 72: Method Participants Four high schoo
Page 73 and 74: TABLE 1 Task Analyses for all Tasks
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Figure 3. Norman multiple baseline
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ing at photographs. Jake only requi
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tion, some aspects of the target be
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table video aids may lead to greate
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TABLE 2 Task Analyses Including Vid
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table.” During the session, the t
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Figure 2. Percent of steps with err
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ter the 15 th session. With table w
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our students, it may have been diff
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Education and Training in Autism an
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TABLE 2 Participants Demographic Da
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opening of the lesson, the teacher
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TABLE 4 Total Number of Items Answe
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Figure 2. Total number of procedura
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serve both cognitive (e.g., self in
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and quasi-experimental designs for
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& Cobb, 2002). Generalization, the
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academic activities in the classroo
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Procedure Baseline. In this multipl
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condition for each student. With th
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was repeated across all participant
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Boning, R. A. (1997). SRA Specific
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TABLE 1 Student demographic informa
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ping, dining out, voting) and diffe
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TABLE 2 Content Standards, Alternat
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Student Achievement Figures 3-6 pro
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Figure 4. Student data across math
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Figure 6. Student data across math
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A second limitation of the current
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y students with intellectual disabi
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TABLE 1 Studies of Mathematics Inte
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subject design to provide an interv
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Neef and colleagues (2003) demonstr
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abilities. Education and Training i
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