Description of Foorman et al. (1998) - The "Houston Study"

Introduction

A recent study sponsored by the NICHD evaluated the impact of both classroom and tutorial treatments (Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998). More specifically, the questions addressed by this study were:

 1. how explicit should phonics instruction be for best results with children at risk for reading failure?

2. to what extent does the reading development of such children depend on their growth in phonological processing skills?

The three classroom approaches studied represent three currently prominent and distinct views on how explicitly to develop beginners’ phonics and decoding skills within a print-rich environment.


These three classroom approaches can be found in the National Research Council's Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children on pages 199-207.


One approach emphasizes explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondences practiced in decodable text (direct code; DC). See an example of direct code.

Another approach emphasizes less explicit instruction in systematic sound-spelling patterns embedded in connected text (embedded code; EC). See an example of embedded code.

The third approach emphasizes implicit instruction in the alphabetic code while reading connected text (implicit code; IC). See an example of implicit code.

These three approaches were compared to standard classroom instruction. The instructional approach of the tutorial sessions was either matched to one of the three classroom approaches or involved the district's standard tutorial regimen, based on the work of Clay (1991).

The principles of whole language and embedded phonics have been described above and correspond to the Implicit Code (IC) and Embedded Code (EC) approaches used in this study. It is important to note that the instructional procedure of embedded phonics was used in the EC approach but not within the context of restructuring, as was reviewed in the previous section.

Classrooms following the direct code approach used the basal reading program, Collections for Young Scholars (Open Court, 1995), which emphasizes a balance of skill- and literature-based activities.

Phonics
In terms of phonics, the first 30 lessons are devoted to phonemic awareness and an understanding of the alphabetic principle; across the middle weeks of the program, 42 spelling-sound correspondences and spelling conventions are explicitly taught and exercised using sound-spelling cards, alliterative stories, blending activities, and controlled vocabulary stories for practicing newly taught patterns in context.

Demographics
The 285 children in the study attended 8 elementary schools in a Houston metropolitan area school district serving a high proportion of economically disadvantaged students. The ethnic composition of the sample was 60 percent African American, 20 percent Hispanic, 20 percent White.

The participating children were those 3-8 children in each regular education classroom who were served through Title 1 in the participating schools. The non-Title 1 children in the classrooms were not participants in the study, at the request of district officials; however, they received the same classroom curriculum as the participating children. Although both first-and second-grade classrooms were included, the first-grade sequence of instruction was also used for the second graders in consideration of their low achievement.

There were 19 implicit code, 20 embedded code, and 14 direct code teachers, all of whom volunteered to participate. Professional development sessions during the summer and throughout the year were conducted by members of the research staff who had teaching experience and were strong proponents of the approach for which they were responsible.

In addition, there were 13 implicit code teachers in an "unseen control" group who delivered the district’s standard instruction and were trained and supervised by district personnel. Bi-monthly monitoring confirmed that classroom teachers in the study generally complied with their assigned instructional approaches.

Instructional groups did not differ in baseline word reading or phonological processing scores.

Measurement of Word Reading and Phonological Processing
Word reading was measured by asking children to read 50 words aloud that were resented one at a time on 4 x 6 cards. Words were matched for frequency(Carroll, Davies, and Richman, 1971), were representative of a diversity of linguistic features, and spanned first through third grade level of difficulty. Scores were based on the number of words read aloud correctly out of 50.

Phonological processing was measured by the synthesis and analysis tests in the Torgesen-Wagner battery (see Wagner, Torgesen, and Rashotte, 1994). The synthesis tests consisted of blending onset rime (m-ouse), blending phonemes in read words (f-a-t), and blending phonemes in nonwords (m-i-b). The analysis tests consisted of:

1. first sound comparison (where children were asked to point to the picture of 3 pictures that started with the same sound as a target picture)

2. elision (dropping the initial. final, or middle sound of a spoken word)

3. sound categorization (naming the nonrhyming word from a set of 3 spoken words)

4. segmentation of a spoken word into phonemes

Each test consisted of demonstration items and 15 test items. Scores were based on factor scores that ranged from 1 to 4.

Because all children received the same curriculum regardless of grade, analyses were conducted with age rather than grade as a factor. Exploratory analyses showed that there was no remaining variability in outcomes due to grade once age effects were controlled.

Controlling for differences in age, ethnicity, and verbal IQ, the researchers found that children in the direct code (DC) approach improved in word reading at a faster rate and had higher word recognition skills in April than children receiving the implicit code (IC) approach (either the research-based IC or the district’s standard IC).

These differences are shown in Figure 1, both for raw scores in the top panel (i.e., observed data) and predicted scores in the bottom panel (i.e., estimates based on the fitted growth model).



Figure 1
Further, whereas a relatively large percentage of children in the implicit code (IC-R and IC-S) and embedded code (EC) groups exhibited no measurable gains in word reading across the school year, growth in word reading for the direct code (DC) group appeared more or less normally distributed, as can be seen in Figure 2.

In fact, only 16% of children in the DC group learned at a rate of 2.5 words or less per school year on the 50-word list, compared to 46% of the children in the IC-R group, 44% of the children in the EC group, and 38% of the children in the IC-S group.



Figure 2
Effects of instructional group on word recognition were moderated by initial levels in phonological processing, and were most apparent in children with poorer initial phonological processing skills, as is apparent in Figure 3.



Figure 3
As is also apparent from Figure 3, there are some children who start the year with low phonological scores who still manage to exhibit considerable growth in reading words. These children were primarily in the DC group, as evidenced by the vertical spread of the diamonds in the left hand side of the graph and the lack of spread in the triangles representing the EC group and the squares representing the IC-R group.

Instructional group differences on end-of-year achievement tests (Woodcock &Johnson, 1989) were clearly apparent: The DC group approached national average on decoding (43% ile) and passage comprehension (45% ile), compared to the IC-R group’s means of 29% ile and 35% ile. (EC group means were 27% ile and 33% ile, respectively).

Although decoding differences were robust, mean differences on the passage comprehension test (i.e., p = .03 for the contrast of the two code groups and p = .056 for the DC vs. IC-R contrast) did not meet the critical level of alpha adopted for this study (i.e., .05/3 experimental groups = .0167).

However, the approach of the authors was designed to minimize Type I errors and was conservative. The mean differences on this measure of reading comprehension were large, favoring the DC group. Furthermore, logistic regression showed that children in the IC and EC groups were much more likely to score below the 25th percentile on the standardized decoding test than children in the DC group. Scores below the 25th percentile are often used to indicate reading disability using traditional diagnostic criteria (Fletcher et al., 1994).

In spite of lower reading performance, children in the IC-R had more positive attitudes towards reading, a finding consistent with other research (e.g., Stahl, McKenna, & Pagnucco, 1994). It is possible that these positive attitudes towards reading, although not associated with higher performance in beginning reading in the research-based implicit code group, may enable students to sustain an interest in reading through the upper grades in school.

Also, with respect to the large individual differences in performance in the EC group, it is possible that some decoding skill is needed before known orthographic rimes are spontaneously used to read unknown words by analogy, thereby requiring a longer period of time for the benefits of the embedded code approach to be realized. As with any other intervention study, longer term follow up with these children is clearly indicated.

In this study, effects of tutoring were minimal. There was no significant difference in reading performance for students whose tutorial matched the content of classroom instruction or for those whose tutorial was based on the district’s standard tutorial regimen, based on the work of Clay (1991).

There was also no effect of student-teacher ratio. However, the ratio was not a constant 1:1 or small group because of teachers’ need to reconstitute groups to adjust for behavioral or learning differences.

Thus, results are not seen as inconsistent with the research supporting the benefits of one-on-one tutoring (e.g., Wasik & Slavin, 1993), especially for students severely impaired in phonological processing skills (Torgesen, 1997; Vellutino et al., 1996).

Summary
In summary, the results of this study clearly indicate that early instructional intervention makes a difference for the development and outcomes of reading skills in first and second grade children at-risk for reading failure. However, not all interventions are equal. Children who were explicitly instructed in the alphabetic principle improved in word reading skill at a significantly faster rate than children indirectly instructed. Children whose instruction was at an intermediate level of explicitness (the embedded code approach) were at an intermediate level of reading growth and outcomes. Group differences in reading comprehension paralleled those for word recognition, but were less robust.

Additionally, these performance differences were due to instruction and not to behavioral or affective differences among groups. Similarly, although outcomes varied across classrooms, measured characteristics of the teachers did not relate significantly to outcome.

Generally, teachers’ attitude toward and compliance with instructional practices were very good across instructional groups and the amount of time devoted to reading and language arts instruction was comparable.

Furthermore, children in all instructional groups with higher phonological processing scores in the beginning of the year demonstrated improvement in word reading skills across the year. However, children with low initial status in phonological processing were more likely to improve in word reading if they received explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle than less explicit or implicit instruction. The authors are pursuing this important finding by comparing the direct code program used in this study (i.e., Open Court, 1995) with other direct code programs that vary in the degree of scriptedness of the teacher’s guide and in the degree of decodability of connected text.

Debate
Considerable debate has developed from this study. Read more about this debate.

References
Carroll, J., Davies, P., & Richman, B. (1971). The American heritage word frequency book. Boston,MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Clay, M. (1991). Reading recovery: A guidebook for teachers in training. Portsmouth,NH: Heinemann.

Foorman, B.R., Fletcher, J.M., Francis, D.J., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta, P. (1998). The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37-55.

Fletcher, J.M., Shaywitz, S.E., Shankweiler, D.P., Katz, L., Liberman, I.Y., Stuebing, K.K., Francis, D.J., Fowler, A.E., & Shaywitz, B.A. (1994). Cognitive profiles of reading disability: Comparisons of discrepancy and low achievement definitions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 6-23.

Open Court Reading. (1995). Collections for young scholars.Chicago and Peru, IL:SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Stahl, S.A., McKenna, M.C., & Pagnucco, J.R. (1994). The effects of whole-language instruction: An update and a reappraisal. Educational Psychologist, 29, 175-186.

Torgesen, J.K. (1997). The prevention and remediation of reading disabilities: Evaluating what we know from research. Journal of Academic Language Therapy, 1, 11-47.

Vellutino, F.R., Scanlon, D.M., Sipay, E., Small, S., Pratt, A., Chen, R., & Denckla, M. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 601-638.

Wagner, R., Torgesen, J.K., & Rashotte, C.A. (1994). Development of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New evidence of bidirectional causality from a latent variable longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 30, 73-87.

Wasik, B., & Slavin, R.E. (1993). Preventing early reading failure with one-to-one tutoring: A review of five programs. Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 178-200.

Woodcock, R.W., & Johnson, M.B. (1989). Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery-Revised. Allen, TX:DLM Teaching Resources.