Taking a Different Route

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Taking a Different Route: Contribution of Articulation and Metacognition to Intervention With At-Risk Third-Grade Readers a

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Guy Trainin , Kathleen M. Wilson , Malinda Murphy-Yagil & Joan L. Rankin-Erickson

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University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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Lincoln Public Schools

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Aurora University Published online: 09 Dec 2014.

To cite this article: Guy Trainin, Kathleen M. Wilson, Malinda Murphy-Yagil & Joan L. Rankin-Erickson (2014) Taking a Different Route: Contribution of Articulation and Metacognition to Intervention With At-Risk Third-Grade Readers, Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 19:3-4, 183-195, DOI: 10.1080/10824669.2014.972103 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2014.972103

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Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk, 19: 183–195, 2014 Copyright Ó Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1082-4669 print / 1532-7671 online DOI: 10.1080/10824669.2014.972103

Taking a Different Route: Contribution of Articulation and Metacognition to Intervention With At-Risk Third-Grade Readers Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 06:16 25 April 2015

Guy Trainin and Kathleen M. Wilson University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Malinda Murphy-Yagil Lincoln Public Schools

Joan L. Rankin-Erickson Aurora University

This study compared the impact of 2 types of small-group interventions targeting below-level 3rd-grade students. The study compared WordWork decoding and spelling instruction (Calfee, Miller, Norman, Wilson, & Trainin, 2006; Calfee & Patrick, 1995), which includes attention to articulation and metacognition, with a more traditional phonological awareness program (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993). University education students delivered the interventions with equal instructional time and fidelity, to both groups. Students in both intervention groups engaged in repeated readings of connected text to promote transfer. The impact of training was assessed through decoding, spelling, and oral reading fluency measures. Results indicated that WordWork produced more positive results in decoding, spelling, and fluency, and had significantly fewer treatment resisters.

Many students with early reading difficulties have an underlying phonological processing deficiency (Stanovich, Cunningham, & Freeman, 1984; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). Although this fact is almost universally accepted, the information about interventions needed to overcome phonologically-based reading difficulties for students past second grade is still meager. For example, the National Reading Panel report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) pointed out that systematic phonological training is an effective intervention for students with this type of reading difficulty, but did not describe the relative efficacy of specific approaches. The report did show the effectiveness of systematic phonological instruction in kindergarten through first grade, but not for struggling readers in second through sixth grade, even though some individual studies have shown that intensive systematic phonological instruction can be effective (e.g., Lovett et al., 1994; Lovett, Warren-Chaplin, Ransby, & Borden, 1990). More recently, a 2013 search of the What Works Clearinghouse identified only

Correspondence should be addressed to Guy Trainin, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0355. E-mail: [email protected]


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12 studies addressing phonological or alphabetics training for students from third to fifth grade, with very inconsistent results. With the current major emphasis on What Works, there has been an increase in the use of meta-analyses and summary reports that attempt to synthesize results and identify evidencebased interventions. Although these analyses and reports offer a great deal to the field, they are often interpreted as the final word on a particular aspect of literacy instruction. The research community must continue to develop and replicate promising theory-based interventions so efforts such as Response-to-Intervention (RTI) can become increasingly efficient and effective. We believe that persistently pursuing theory-based interventions will provide the empirical support to make them research-based (empirically supported), so teachers can be justified in adapting to help struggling readers efficiently. This study extends the understanding of effective early reading interventions by considering readers beyond second grade, and with the addition of instructional components that emphasize articulation and metacognition, as well as basic phonology skills. Some reading programs are not addressing the comprehensive needs of the hardest-to-teach children (Perie, Grigg, & Donahue, 2005). Many reading programs, however, are increasingly integrating systematic phonological training (i.e., phonological awareness and phonics) into the curriculum as part of RTI first-tier evidence-based classroom practice. The rise of RTI as a way to organize reading instruction in schools recognizes the difficulties some students have in acquiring the necessary skills for effective reading even when they receive quality classroom instruction. It may be that explicit instruction with high-quality phonological training alone is not sufficient to bridge the gap in decoding and spelling knowledge for this group of students (e.g., Reynolds & Shaywitz, 2009; Tran, Sanchez, Arellano, & Lee Swanson, 2011). These students, who can be classified as treatment resisters (Torgesen et al., 1999), may need a different approach. Although we do not necessarily agree with the negative connotations associated with this term, it is part of the discussion and a key idea in RTI and, thus, we use it here. Contemporary phonological instruction tends to rely on teacher-centered, direct instruction of exactly explicated phonological objectives (Adams et al., 2005; Englemann & Bruner, 1988). It typically emphasizes onset-rhyme patterns and letter–sound correspondences based on teacher modeling and student practice with feedback. An overwhelmingly large number of specific objectives confront teachers and students with a monumental task, undermining the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction and ensuring that many of those students will fail to catch up in spite of significant investments of resources and time. We suggest that a more efficient way to design an intervention must start with a clear theoretical underpinning. The motor theory of speech perception offers such a starting point (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). The theory holds that the motor act of speech production undergirds the path to effective phonological processing. Phonological processing, in turn, is necessary for normal development of decoding, the first step toward fluent reading (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris, & Snowling, 2004). The motor theory of speech perception predicts that the quality and awareness of speech production will influence subsequent decoding and spelling skills. Empirical support for this theory can be found in research reporting that articulation is associated with phonological awareness in children (Gillon, 2000; Overby, Tranin, Bosma Smit, Bernthal. & Nelson, 2012; Webster & Plante, 1992). Further, articulation skill has been found to be closely associated with phonological awareness, independent of mental age, chronological age, and educational experience (Webster & Plante, 1992). Castiglioni-Spalthen and Ehri (2003) found that students


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who were instructed in monitoring their articulatory gestures while segmenting words into phonemes performed better on reading and spelling tasks than children who only listened to the sounds while segmenting. Based on Liberman and Mattingly’s (1985) motor theory of speech perception and its relationship to literacy development, several intervention programs for reading and spelling difficulties incorporate articulation into the intervention program. Examples include WordWork (Calfee & Norman, 1999; Calfee & Patrick, 1995), as well as the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood, 1998). WordWork asks students to actively and consciously feel their articulatory gestures. We believe that slowing down articulation and paying close attention to articulatory gestures (we ask students, “What do you feel when you make the /p/ sounds?”) allows for a linguistic discussion of what students feel. This discussion allows students to think about sounds carefully, to distinguish them, and to manipulate them once again. This attention to the individual sound creates a new pathway to phonemic awareness, which, in turn, will improve the subsequent skills of phonological processing and automatic word reading. In this study, we use WordWork to test the relevance of relying on the motor theory of speech and the cognitive science concept of chunking information into relatable units to make them more memorable (Sweller, 1994). The unique feature of WordWork is the metaphonic principle. According to Calfee, by using the metaphonic principle, “Students are expected to give the correct pronunciation and spelling, but also to explain how they reached it” (Calfee, 1998, p. 316). Another component is the direct attention to the orthography of the English language (Balmuth, 1982; Venezky, 1970, 1999). This approach takes into account the possibility that third-grade students who struggle with decoding and spelling have less experience with English orthography than more proficient readers, due to less time spent reading connected text (the Matthew effect; Stanovich, 1986). If our hypotheses regarding the key roles of articulation and metacognition are true, then phonological training alone will not be enough, and an intervention should include an explicit orthographic approach, as well as a novel approach to phonology. This study was concerned with using theory-based intervention to affect struggling thirdgrade students. We were concerned with the question: How can these students gain the most in a short-term intervention? More specifically, the study was carried out to address three questions: (a) Will struggling third-grade readers who receive metaphonic and orthographic training improve their decoding and spelling skill to a significantly greater degree than students receiving training in a more traditional phonological program? (b) Will gains in decoding and spelling skills translate into gains in oral reading fluency? And, (c) how do students who are most at risk to be treatment resisters (below the 25th percentile in reading) fare?

METHODS Participants Participants were recruited from five schools serving students of low socioeconomic status in a midsized, midwestern city. Third-grade classroom teachers identified 67 students as reading 1 or more years below grade-level expectation. These children spoke English as their primary

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TABLE 1 Preintervention Scores by Group WordWork (n D 27)


Subtest Phonemic Awareness (CTOPP) Elision Rapid Digit Sound Match Phonological Processing (Tile Test) Decoding Spelling Fluency (Graduated Running Record; GRR) GRR

PAT (n D 26)

Range

M

SD

M

SD

0–20 0–21 0–20

11.00 7.00 16.57

3.32 1.79 2.79

9.80 7.12 16.72

4.40 1.62 2.62

0–8 0–8

5.60 4.60

1.60 1.02

5.57 4.73

1.52 1.63

31.46

10.30

28.33

9.58

Note. CTOPP D Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing.

language and were not eligible for special education services at the time of the intervention. Throughout the course of the study, a total of 14 students dropped out of the study because their family moved (5), due to transportation problems (8), and over behavior difficulties (1). This left 53 students (33 boys, 20 girls) who completed the intervention. Twenty-seven of the participants were in the WordWork group and 26 in the Phonological Awareness Training for Reading group. Attrition was equal across both groups. Regarding the initial achievement of participants, Table 1 shows that most of the participants had significant challenges in phonological and phonemic processes. For example, the sound matching subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) showed that the average student score was on the 25th percentile, and on the 37th for elision. For students in third grade who are focusing on more advanced skills, these are significant differences to which most teachers do not have the capacity to attend within a third-grade curriculum. We stratified students by school, then randomly placed them into one of two intervention groups within the school, to control for possible school effects. Each tutoring group consisted of three to five students. Groups were assigned to receive before- or afterschool tutoring, depending on school schedule. Early-start schools had afterschool tutoring and late-start schools scheduled tutoring for the mornings before school began.

Tutors Students enrolled in education programs at a local university (four graduate, 12 undergraduate; one men, 15 women) were recruited to provide the small-group intervention. The tutors participated in three training sessions. The first meeting discussed the nature of the research (absent a discussion of the hypotheses, to prevent potential bias), managing small groups, and behavioral expectations and strategies. In the second training session, tutors were randomly assigned to treatment groups, separated, and subsequently trained in the program to which they were assigned. Two weeks into the semester, all tutors participated in a third training session focused on implementing repeated readings to build fluency. The fluency component was added to both groups to allow for transfer of whatever skills were gained into the reading of connected texts.


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Tutors completed lesson logs and lesson reflections following each tutoring session. A researcher observed each tutor at least twice to measure and maintain program fidelity. The observations were followed by individual feedback and discussion. Additionally, the tutors attended biweekly meetings for implementation support and providing a forum to discuss questions and concerns.


Procedures The interventions included instruction in WordWork curriculum (Calfee & Norman, 1999) with its primary emphases on metaphonics, articulation, and orthography and the Phonological Awareness Training for Reading (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993). Because we believe that fluency training augments the transfer of phonics concepts and supports the growth of sight words, both groups received equal practice with reading fluency. Based on the conclusions of previous meta-analyses (e.g., Swanson, 1999) and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), we preferred small-group instruction to individual instruction. Each group started instruction with its curriculum for the first 2 weeks of the intervention. Instruction was conducted in three 45-min sessions each week for 11 weeks. The key characteristics of each intervention are described below. WordWork. WordWork (Calfee & Patrick, 1995) is an integrated phonemic awareness, decoding, and spelling program designed for students from kindergarten through second grade and older at-risk students. It is an approach based on the metaphonic principle: learning to decode and spell by understanding conceptually the logical similarities and differences of letter–sound relationships rather than through rote memory. Students focus on articulation and systematic instruction of English orthography. The curriculum emphasizes conceptual understanding through metacognition and combining direct instruction with problem solving. The curriculum is sequential, covering phonemic awareness and Anglo-Saxon spelling patterns: consonants, consonant blends and digraphs, short vowels, long vowels, the consonant- vowelconsonant (CVC) patterns, and the English orthographic ending system for the Anglo-Saxon layer of the language including suffixes and the phonics doubling rule (e.g., tap, taps, tapping; tape, taping). Instruction is active, social, and reflective, utilizing small group activities and direct instruction. Manipulatives (letter tiles) are used to reinforce learning because they help make the connections concrete (Calfee & Patrick, 1995). Student learning is also scaffolded by the group’s development of vocabulary for talking about decoding, spelling, and articulation. Phonological Awareness Training for Reading. The Phonological Awareness Training for Reading (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993) was selected for comparison with WordWork (Calfee & Norman, 1999) intervention. One of the expressed uses of the program is for “children who are experiencing difficulty learning to use phonological strategies when reading words” (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993, p. 1). The program is organized into four sets of literacy activities: warmup, sound blending, sound segmenting, and reading and spelling. The warm-up phase includes rhyming activities with particular emphasis on helping students attend to the sounds in words. Following the warm up, students are taught to blend sounds, beginning with blending onset and


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rhyme, and moving on to blending individual phonemes. Segmentation instruction trains students to hear similar beginning, ending, and middle sounds. Finally, children are taught the letters that represent the phonemes and apply this knowledge to reading and spelling. The training manual includes detailed directions and sample dialogue for each session in each phase. Throughout the program, a small set of words, called wordsets, are used. The authors provide the following rationale for this: “The children become very familiar with a small set of sounds by working within wordsets comprising a restricted number of different phonemes. . . . This makes the awareness tasks much easier” (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993, p. 4). These words are used throughout the training program in the instructional activities and games. The Phonological Awareness Training for Reading program does include some attention to meta-articulation as a strategy for achieving phonemic awareness. There is, however, a significant difference in the ways WordWork and Phonological Awareness Training for Reading use meta-articulation. In WordWork, articulation is the key to phonemic awareness and all learning starts with students feeling and describing the way to make the sounds. In the Phonological Awareness Training for Reading, sequence articulation is used as a last effort, a fix-it strategy when students are unable to make progress with the phonemic awareness practice. Fluency training. After tutors and students gained familiarity with the main instructional sequence, 3 weeks into the intervention, a component of connected text reading was added. At the beginning of each session, students read a familiar text (from the previous session). Following the phonological instructional segment of each session, students did a choral reading followed by an individual reading of a new text, with teacher feedback provided. Passages used for this purpose came from the QuickReads fluency program (Hiebert, 2002). The QuickReads materials were chosen because they provided short, informational passages about science and social studies topics that were of high interest to students and were at the third-grade reading level. The passages included overlap of content words (Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985) and gave students an opportunity to encounter, briefly discuss, and practice new and relevant content area vocabulary within the passages. This component was added equally to both instructional components, providing students repeated practice in applying the skills they were learning to the reading of connected text. The addition of oral reading fluency practice to both groups allowed us to help students transfer their new skills to connected text reading while maintaining the focus on the phonological intervention as the dependent variable.

Measures CTOPP. The CTOPP (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999) is designed to assess the phonological processing skills of individuals from age five to adulthood. The test allows the administrator to assess specific phonological strengths and weaknesses in the child. The specific subtests used as a pre- and posttest in this study were elision, sound matching, and rapid digit naming. We chose these three subtests to give us an indication of each student’s phonological processing speed and phonemic awareness level. In the elision subtest, the students are asked to repeat a word spoken by the examiner and then asked what the word would become if a specific phoneme were deleted. For example, the student would say the word hook and then be asked how the word would sound without the /h/. The sound-matching subtest shows the child


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pictures and asks the child to point to the picture that represents initial and final sound matching of the target picture. In the rapid digit-naming subtest, students are presented with an array of six rows of five single digits. The student is instructed to name the digits as quickly as possible and the time this takes is recorded. With this sample, the CTOPP demonstrated reliability coefficients ranging from .70 to .92. The overall reliability coefficient was a D .86. Tile Test. The Tile Test is a tool used to assess early and emergent reading skills (Norman & Calfee, 2004). It is administered individually and is used with students in the primary grades. This instrument is useful for measuring students’ understanding of letters, words, and sentences. Additionally, this measure assesses the students’ metalinguistic abilities as related to strategy use, using a seven-point (0 D no response; “I don’t know” to 6 D explains how sounds are articulated; “It starts with a /p/, my lips are together and the air pops out, my tongue is resting in the middle of my mouth”) rating rubric. For this study, only the spelling and decoding subtests were given. The decoding subtest of the Tile Test begins with CVC words constructed with letter tiles. To quickly assess the child’s level of understanding and application of simple letter-sound correspondences, the first three tasks are a progression from the previous word (i.e., the teacher builds pat, then sat, followed by sam, with the child being asked to read each word after it is built.) Using synthetic words that follow standard English orthography, the next five tasks reflect the CVC unit (hin), the silent-e rule (vute), consonant blends (flass), the doubling rule (lodded), and two syllable words (wembick). The raw score on this task is determined by the correct pronunciation of each word, with zero to eight points possible. In the spelling subtest, the child is required to construct words, both real and synthetic, first with final consonant variations (e.g., “Make tan, change it to tad, change it to tap.”) and then following the same sequence described previously in the decoding subtest moving from a CVC unit to a synthetic work with two syllables. The raw score on this task is determined by the correct spelling of each word, with 0–8 points possible. This task is followed by questions aimed at understanding the student’s spelling strategies. Specifically, the student is asked, “How did you know how to spell _______ (the last word spelled correctly)?” The internal consistency of both tasks was relatively low. The internal-consistency measure of reliability for the Tile Test was .62 (based on pretest scores). The Tile Test was used as a pre- and posttest for this study. Graduate Running Record (GRR). The GRR (Calfee, Wilson, & Graves, 2007) was used as a pre- and posttest to assess oral reading fluency and comprehension. This assessment is administered individually, and can be used from mid-first grade through sixth-grade reading level. The unique advantage of the GRR is that, as the student progresses in the story, the vocabulary and the sentences themselves become increasingly more challenging, allowing the administrator to quickly approximate a student’s reading level. Although the passage covers one topic, each sentence increases one reading grade level from the previous one. The sentences were constructed using reading-grade-level words found in a variety of informal reading inventory lists (e.g., the Qualitative Reading Inventory–3; Leslie & Caldwell, 2001). Two stop rules apply to the assessment—a time limit of 90 secs or reading four or more grade-level words in a sentence incorrectly. The raw score for fluency on the GRR is the number of underlined words read correctly in 90 secs. The average time needed to administer the GRR varies with the reading level, but does not exceed the 90 sec limit. The reliability of the GRR for this sample was a D .87 (based on pretest results).

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RESULTS Fidelity was calculated based on a combination of teaching logs and researcher observations. Fidelity scores ranged from .82 to .96, showing that all instruction had high rates of program fidelity. There were no significant differences in fidelity between the tutors in the two programs. We first tested the difference between the groups before the intervention to make sure they were equal at the start of the intervention. Table 1 contains the pretest scores for both the WordWork and Phonemic Awareness Training groups. The means and standard deviations presented in this table are based on raw scores. We conducted a one-way ANOVA to whether the groups were comparable at pretest. The analysis yielded F(1,51) D .323, MSE D 393.13, showing no significant differences between the groups. To test for possible gender differences, a second one-way ANOVA was conducted which showed no significant differences between boys and girls, F(1,51) D .055, MSE D 66.85.

(1) Will Struggling Third-Grade Readers Who Receive Metaphonic and Orthographic Training Improve Their Decoding and Spelling Skill to a Significantly Greater Degree Than Students Receiving Training in a More Traditional Phonological Program? Separate ANCOVAs were conducted to test group differences on each of the constructs: phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and oral reading rate with initial achievement (prescore) in each domain as a covariate. Attendance was originally entered as a covariate, as there was an indication that attendance may have been a factor influencing results. Attendance rates were not a significant covariate and, thus, were subsequently dropped. To control for Type I error rates, the experimentwise error rate was set at .05 and individual tests used a corrected alpha level set at p < .0167. Levene’s tests (Levene, 1960) of equality of variances showed equal variances across all tests. Following the intervention there were no significant group differences in phonemic awareness scores for the CTOPP, F(1,51) D 1.81, p D .18, MSE D 24.358, despite a moderate effect size d D .38 (see Figure 1). Significant group differences were found on the Tile Test, F(1,50) D 11.55, p D .001, MSE D 4.02, d D .94 (see Figure 2), showing that students tutored using the WordWork curriculum (Calfee & Norman, 1998) fared better on spelling and decoding than the Phonological Awareness Training control students. In the metacognitive portion of the tile test analysis of covariance showed a highly significant effect F(1,51) D 17.53, p < .001, MSE D .113, d D 1.1 showing that using WordWork increased students’ ability to explain how they know to decode and spell words.

(2) Will Gains in Decoding and Spelling Skills Translate Into Gains in Oral Reading Fluency? Here, too, we used separate ANCOVAs to test group differences in oral reading rate with initial achievement (prescore) as a covariate. Attendance rates, once again, were not a significant covariate and, thus, were dropped from the analysis. To control for Type I error rates we used a


Phonemic Awareness (CTOPP)

Group WordWork Control

34

32

Pre

Post Time

FIGURE 1 Growth in phonemic awareness by group.

corrected alpha level set at p < .0167. Levene’s tests (Levene, 1960) of equality of variances showed equal variances. There was a significant group difference in reading fluency again favoring the WordWork group, F(1,51) D 7.99, p D .007, MSE D 228.90 (see Figure 3). The effect size for this measure was also large, d D .79. 13

Phonological Processing (Tile Test)


36

191

12.5

Group WordWork Control

12

11.5

11

12.5

10

Pre

Post Time

FIGURE 2 Growth in phonological processing by group.

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42

Graduated Running Record


40

WordWork Control

38 36 34 32 30 28 Pre

Post Time

FIGURE 3 Growth in reading fluency by group.

(3) How Do Students Who Are Most At Risk to be Treatment Resisters (Below the 25th Percentile in Reading) Fare? The relatively small sample does not allow for a robust statistical examination of the impact on students below the 25th percentile. Instead, we provide a visual and descriptive assessment of this group. An examination of Figure 4 shows that most students show growth (above the diagonal). Only 6 out of the 18 WordWork students who started at or below the 25th percentile were below the 25th percentile at the end of the intervention. In the control group, 12 out of 18 were still below the 25th percentile at the end of the intervention.

DISCUSSION The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of placing emphases on metaphonics, articulation, and orthography during phonological instruction of third-grade struggling readers. This study was motivated by the need to find effective instructional strategies for students who continue to struggle with decoding words beyond second grade. Our previous successful experiences with WordWork in the primary grades (Calfee et al., 2006) led us to believe that we could achieve significant gains with older struggling readers as long as we provided support and practice with real texts too. This study provides clear and strong evidence for using WordWork (Calfee & Norman, 1999) with this population. The results show that students receiving the WordWork intervention outperformed a more traditional phonological training group (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993) in phonological processing (measured by the spelling of real and synthetic words). The significant increase in phonological processing transferred into superior performance in oral reading fluency for the WordWork group.


193

Group WordWork PAT

60

Grade Level

40


Post

25% percentile (Post)

20

25% percentile (Pre) 0

20

40

60

Pre

FIGURE 4 Pre- and post-Graduated Running Record results by group.

The large effect sizes in spelling and oral reading fluency indicate significant differences especially when considering that both groups received meaningful interventions. These findings are particularly impressive considering that the study employed the very successful Phonological Awareness Training for Reading (Torgesen & Bryant, 1993) program as the instructional program used in the control group. Individual student results show that an overwhelming majority of the students most at risk were out of the lowest quartile by the end of the WordWork intervention. Although we did not test this hypothesis, based on previous research and our results, we recommend that an intervention with older students should also include reading connected text. Reading connected text gives struggling students the opportunity to put their new decoding knowledge to functional use as quickly as possible. The repeated readings used in this fluency practice gave the students additional practice with the types of words they encountered in grade-level texts. During the repeated readings of the passages in the QuickReads materials (Hiebert, 2002), students practiced reading a variety of orthographic patterns. These findings suggest that the combination of the questions used to support the students’ metacognitive thinking about decoding and spelling along with the engaging format of the articulation portions of the WordWork (Calfee & Norman, 1999) lessons helped students maintain their attention in what might otherwise be mundane and repetitive skills practice. In addition, the organizing structure found in the articulation training also aided students to more successfully retrieve needed phonological information as they spelled words and decoded words and when they read connected text. We employed a small-group instruction based on the conclusions of previous meta-analyses (e.g., Swanson, 1999) and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986). The results suggest that students benefited from this type of environment. Observations and lesson


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reflections by the tutors showed that they were motivated and actively engaged throughout the lessons. Some limitations to our study must be acknowledged. The study did not include a measure of comprehension. As a result, we were unable to discern whether the growth in phonological processing and fluency led to increased comprehension. The limited sample size, although not unusual in intensive efficacy studies, calls for a replication to confirm our results. In conclusion, the results presented support the use of phonological interventions with older students. This study highlights the efficacy of the WordWork approach (Calfee & Patrick, 1995) and suggests that the focus on metacognition and articulation is an effective instructional strategy for this age of struggling readers. The model used in the study targeted struggling readers outside of the regular school day. We believe that phonological intervention with older students should not occur as part of the reading instruction delivered to all students, because most students do not need this additional training. This model will allow regular instruction to focus on fluency and comprehension for all students, while helping struggling readers reach gradelevel performance.

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