Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2757
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Item The Effectiveness of a Color-Coded, Onset-Rime Reading Intervention With First Grade Students At Serious Risk For Reading Disabilities(2007-04-25) Hines, Sara Jane; Speece, Deborah L.; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning readers who are weak decoders usually continue to fall behind in reading as they progress through school, negatively affecting their overall academic performance, self-esteem, and motivation. Therefore, it is imperative to develop instructional practices to assist the acquisition of effective decoding skills. Although existing remedial approaches have proven effective with a number of students with reading problems, they have not been successful with those students most at risk and have generally not resulted in transfer of skills to decoding novel words not targeted in instruction. I used a single-subject multiple probe design across participants to investigate the effectiveness of a color-coded, onset-rime based decoding intervention. The participants were first grade students determined to be at serious risk for reading disabilities based on their performance on screening measures. All four of the students made strong progress in learning the instructional words, increasing on average 73% over baseline (range 66%-78%). In addition, for novel words from instructed rime patterns, students increased their scores from baseline to post-intervention by an average of 56% (range 50% to 62%). There was limited transfer at the vowel level to uninstructed rime patterns, with students improving their scores by an average of 29% (range 17% to 50%). All students maintained their improvement in decoding skills for both instructional and transfer words at one week and one month maintenance. The fact that the children were able not only to master instructional words but also to use their knowledge of rime patterns to decode uninstructed words is important given the difficulty of students most at-risk for reading disabilities to master instructional words and transfer decoding gains. Furthermore, the three participants with the lowest performance prior to instruction showed strong improvement on a standardized measure of reading achievement (Woodcock-Johnson Reading Mastery Test-Revised, Normative Update). The effectiveness of the program in improving the decoding skills of readers who are significantly at-risk is a promising first step in finding an instructional approach that is successful with students who have been left behind not just by traditional classroom instruction but by remedial approaches as well.Item INSTRUCTION PROVIDED TO STUDENTS OF DIFFERENT ABILITIES IN A WITHIN-CLASS SETTING(2004-11-16) Chorzempa, Barbara Lynn; Graham, Steve; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study was designed to examine primary grade teachers' use of within-class ability grouping, including if the operation and dynamics of ability grouping differ for above-average, average, and below-average readers. Characteristics of the teacher, school, and classroom were also examined to determine if these variables predict teachers' use of ability grouping. 600 randomly selected primary (i.e., first, second, and third) grade teachers from throughout the United States were asked to complete a questionnaire; 222 elected to participate, 272 declined participation and 106 were eliminated from the study for a variety of reasons (e.g., retired, maternity leave, no longer a primary grade teacher or employee); thus yielding a response rate of 45%. In addition to demographic information about the teachers, their students, and the schools, participants responded to a series of questions designed to assess teacher efficacy in reading, beliefs about reading instruction, and beliefs about ability grouping. Teachers who use ability grouping were further asked to answer a series of questions about how ability groups operate for above-average, average, and below-average readers in their class. Results showed that 63% of the teachers questioned either reported (55%) or were identified (7%) as using ability grouping through open-ended questions. Statistically significant results were noted when comparing the instruction provided to and materials used with students of varying ability. Furthermore, three variables (i.e., beliefs about ability grouping, years teaching, and location) were also found to contribute to the prediction of teachers' use of ability grouping. Future research and limitations are also addressed.