Special Education ETDs

James D. Hall

Publication Date

7-27-1976

Abstract

THE EFFECTS OF PERCEPTUAL CONDITIONING UPON DECODING AND ENCODING ABILITIES OF CHILDREN WITH LOW ACHIEVEMENT

James D. Hall Department of Special Education The University of New Mexico, 1976

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two decoding training procedures upon the decoding and encoding abilities of third grade children with low achievement. The methods studied were Perceptual Conditioning (Glass, 1971a) and Perceptual Conditioning with an added spelling step. An experimental group of 24 third graders, who pretested at or below the 3.8 grade level on the Diagnostic Reading Scales word lists, were randomly assigned to one of two experi­mental groups or to a control group. Each group had eight subjects. A pretest-posttest control group design was used in the investigation. Pretest-posttest instruments included the word recognition lists of the Diagnostic Reading Scales and a written spelling test consisting of the words on the spelling supplementary test of the Gates-McKillop Reading Diagnostic Tests. Subjects were instructed fifteen minutes daily for twenty consecutive school days. Subjects in the first experimental group were instructed through Perceptual Conditioning. Subjects in the second experimental group were instructed through Perceptual Conditioning with an added spelling step. Subjects in the control group were instructed through an instructional games format.

Pretest and posttest comparisons between the experimen­tal and control groups were made using the Mann-Whitney􀀁 test. No significant differences existed between the two groups at the time of pretesting. All groups were likewise found to score similarly on the posttests. Between-group com­parison of gain scores revealed that the second experimental group made spelling test gains which were, at the .025 level of significance for a one-tailed test, significantly greater than gains made by either of the other two groups. Within the control and experimental groups, pretest-posttest compari­sons were made using the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test. All comparisons made within the control and experimen­tal groups yielded Wilcoxon T’s significant at or beyond the .025 level for a one-tailed test.

These results suggest that low achieving students trained by use of Perceptual Conditioning with the added spelling step would make greater gains in spelling ability than would simi­lar students trained by use of either Perceptual Conditioning or educational reading games. That any one of the three training procedures should result in significantly greater gains in decoding ability is not suggested.

Document Type

Thesis

Language

English

Degree Name

Special Education

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

Special Education

First Committee Member (Chair)

Billy Leslie Watson

Second Committee Member

Richard McDowell

Third Committee Member

James Everett

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