The Effect of a Multisensory Approach on Increasing Sight Word Acquisition and Fluency in First Grade Students
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2020-05-08
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Masters of Education
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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a multisensory approach on sight word acquisition and fluency in first grade students. A pretest-posttest treatment-control group design was used with two groups of first-grade students, each formed by random assignment. One group of students, the control group, received traditional sight word instruction while the second group of students, the treatment group, received sight word instruction via a multisensory approach that incorporated visual, audio, tactile, and kinesthetic learning styles. The instrument used in this study was the First 100 Fry Words. The students had two minutes to correctly identify as many of the First 100 Fry Words as they could without hesitation (i.e., within 5 seconds of seeing the word). The words that were unknown to each participant were chosen as the target words for the length of the study. Each week, the students received a list of ten target words to practice. At the end of the week, the students were assessed and any words that were not mastered by all students were used again the next week. Words that were mastered were removed and new words from the target list were added to create a total of ten words for the week. A two-sample t-test assessed the difference between the treatment and control population means on the pretest and four subsequent null hypothesis tests. The null hypothesis could not be rejected as the students in the treatment group did not make differential statistically significant gains in sight word acquisition and fluency compared with the control. Future research should continue to provide researchers and educators with more information on the use of a multisensory approach when developing sight word acquisition and fluency.