A Randomized Trial of a Computer-Assisted Tutoring Program Targeting Letter-Sound Expression.

Abstract. Given that many schools have limited resources and a high proportion of students who present with deficits in early literacy skills, supports aimed at preventing reading failure must be simple and efficient and generate meaningful changes in student learning. We used a randomized group design with a wait-list control to extend the work of Volpe, Burns, DuBois, and Zaslofsky (2011), who found a computer-assisted tutoring program designed to teach young children letter sounds using incremental rehearsal to be an efficient and acceptable intervention for students who were slow to respond to class-wide early literacy intervention. In our study, a total of 30 kindergarten and first-grade students were randomly assigned to either 2 weeks of computer-aided tutoring or a wait-list control group. The effects of the intervention were investigated using multiple-level modeling over four assessment periods (pretreatment, 1 week of intervention, 2 weeks of intervention, and 1-week follow-up). Results were consistent across dependent measures, with rates of growth and follow-up scores significantly higher for the intervention group as compared with the control group. Given that these skills were enhanced in an efficient manner and maintained for at least 1 week, the computer-assisted tutoring intervention appears to be an appropriate support for rapidly improving early skill deficits related to letter-sound knowledge and decoding. ********** The importance of preventative instruction and intervention is highlighted by longitudinal studies showing the stability of early reading deficits. This research consistently finds that most children who struggle with reading during their first 3 years of school remain poor readers throughout their education (e.g., Phillips, Norris, Osmond, & Maynard, 2002). Because efforts to remediate deficits in reading become more challenging after third grade (Torgesen, 2002), preventing reading failure necessitates that supports be implemented as early as possible (Vadasy, Sanders, & Peyton, 2006). Early Literacy Targets and Intervention Alphabetic skills, such as knowledge of letter sounds, are primary targets of early instruction and intervention given their capacity to support children's reading development (Piasta, Justice, McGinty, & Kaderavek, 2012). The sequential relationship between alphabetic skills and word reading is addressed in the four-phase model of sight-word development of Ehri (2005). In this model, all children begin in a prealphabetic phase in which they lack awareness of phoneme-grapheme relationships and often guess what words are on the basis of physical features (e.g., a brand logo) or context (i.e., logographic reading). In the partial-alphabetic phase, children acquire knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. With repeated exposure to graphemephoneme relationships, children enter a full-alphabetic phase in which they begin applying this knowledge fluently and accurately to text. In the concluding phase (consolidated alphabetic), children are able to exercise their skills to decode and articulate unfamiliar words. Therefore, knowledge of letter sounds can be conceptualized as a skill that provides the foundational underpinnings of activities that involve decoding and reading. Many schools have a high proportion of students with gaps in alphabetic skills (U.S. Department of Education, 2001) and limited resources for remediation. Consequently, interventions designed to enhance early literacy skills must be efficient and generate meaningful changes in student learning (Skinner, 2008). One method of teaching fact-based information that requires few resources is flashcard drill procedures (Nist & Joseph, 2008). As an alternative to traditional drill (TD) procedures that exclusively present unknown information, interspersal drill techniques have been developed that present known units of information along with unknown information in varying ratios (Cates et al. …