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Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of a phonological awareness (PA) intervention, designed for Tier 2 instruction in a Response to Intervention (RTI) model, delivered to small groups of preschoolers.
Method: A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention on low-income preschool children's PA skills. A trained interventionist delivered small group sessions 3 to 4 days a week and ensured children received frequent opportunities to respond and contingent feedback. Participants received 28 to 36 lessons that lasted about 10 min each and focused on PA and alphabet knowledge. Initiation of intervention was staggered across 3 triads, and 7 children completed the study.
Results: The intervention produced consistent gains on weekly progress monitoring assessments of the primary outcome measure for first sound identification (First Sound Fluency). Most children also demonstrated gains on other measures of PA and alphabet knowledge.
Conclusions: Results provide support for the application of a small group intervention consistent with an RTI framework and document the potential benefits of the intervention to learners who need early literacy instruction beyond the core curriculum.
Learning to read may be one of the most important skills that children accomplish. As such, persistent reading deficits observed among school-age children demand attention. For example, nearly two thirds of fourth graders do not read at grade level, and this trend has persisted for years (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Fundamental skills necessary for learning to read, such as phonological awareness (PA), develop early in life and are predictive of reading outcomes (e.g., National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2008; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). Weakness in PA skills is associated with difficulty reading (Ehri et al., 2001), and many children, especially those from low socioeconomic status, exhibit deficits in PA (McDowell, Lonigan, & Goldstein, 2007). Given this evidence, interventions that address the development of early literacy skills of young children with identified deficits are critical for promoting long-term literacy skills.
PA has been defined as the "ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure of words independent of their meaning" (Phillips, Clancy-Manchetti, & Lonigan, 2008, p. 3) and is reflected by several skills (e.g., blending, segmenting, rhyming, phoneme isolation), which tend to develop sequentially. In addition, the...