英文摘要 |
An early remedial reading program was taught by trained undergraduate students to 33 2nd-grade underachievers for 2 semesters. In addition to examining whether the children, as a group, were improved as a result of this systematic and intensive remedial instruction, the researcher also looked at the differences between the experimental and control groups. The 4 major findings were: (1) children in the experimental group made better progress than their peers in the control group. Using the pretest and IQ as covariates, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on Chinese Phonetic Symbols (Chu-Yin Fu-Hao, CYFH) at the end of the first semester, and on character recognition at the end of second semester. However, no significant between-group difference was found for reading comprehension. (2) Children in the experimental group caught up with the national norm when it came to CYFH ability. However, no such catching-up was found with character recognition. The mean gap between the experimental group and the national norm did not close, although it seemed that, when the two means were compared, the program successfully prevented the so-called “the poor gets poorer” phenomenon. (3) No matter how slow they were in CYFH learning, a majority of children caught up with their peers after the remedial program. With respect to character recognition, however, those who were rated the lowest in the pretest seemed to be the most unlikely to catch up with their peers. (4) IQ only correlated with pretest scores; it was not a good predictor of later reading progress. The better predictors of reading progress were pretest scores and teaching quality. |