Progressive Choice Reading Techniques in a Remedial Reading Clinic

Abstract

THE USE OF Progressive Choice in teaching reading was originally evolved as a remedial read ing tool. Several controlled experiments of Pro gressive Choice have been recorded, (1, 2). Each of these has been conducted with certified teachers who have had some classroom experience. The present study deals with the use of Prog r e s s i v e Choice by student clinicians with almost no class room experience, who were learning to teach read ing by the Progressive Choice method while also learning techiques for handling children. Any stu dent clinical situation always has the requirement that pupils who attend the clinic not suffer as a function of their having been involved in the student clinician's learning experience. Hopefully, of course, these pupils will take away some benefits from their experience, and it has been suggested that the mere exposure of a pupil to a considerable amount of time and individual help, no matter how good, will benefit him, since he will spend more time specifically on reading than he m i g ht in the classroom. A portion of pupils who come to remedial read ing clinics for elementary school pupils have read ing problems resulting from a lack of basic skills. The Progressive Choice Reading Method is aptly suited to the teaching of these basic skills,, A prob lem arises, however, particularly for the clinician who does not have daily contact with the pupils, when pupils have mastered some of the skills and not others; re-teaching already learned skills could expend considerable time and energy which would be of relatively little value for pupil or clinician,, To solve this problem, and to expedite remedial train ing, a Reading Skills Diagnostic Test was devised which tested the child's knowledge of basic reading skills in the sequence in which they were presented in the Progressive Choice Program. The student clinician could, therefore, test a block of skills which the child should know, and then enter the Pro gressive Choice Program at the appropriate point to teach the required skilL For the present experiment, four groups of stu dent clinicians were used. The data was collected as a result of a course in which the student clini cians were enrolled to learn remedial reading teach ing skills. The clinicians were aware that their success or failure in the course would not be meas ured in terms of the gains that the child made on reading tests, but rather in terms of their perform ance in the clinical situation and their ability to write adequate case studies. Two groups of students were required to give the Gates Primary or Advanced Primary Word Recognition Test in alternate forms at the beginning and at the end of their clinic expe rience. Two other groups gave Gates Paragraph Reading Tests. Each student clinician met with his pupil twice a week for forty-minute sessions. The clinic experience extended for twelve weeks, for a total of twenty-four sessions. On the average, six of these were devoted to testing, leaving approxi mately eighteen teaching contacts. The pupils in the study came from centralized schools in small communities of 3000 to 5000 in Western New York State. The pupils were recom mended to the reading clinic by their teachers as be ing at least a year below grade level, and generally slow to learn. Pupils in the study ranged from third grade to sixth grade. Their reading levels ranged from 1. 2 to 5. 2 at the outset of the study. The read ing grade level at the conclusion of the clinic expe rience ranged from 1. 8 to 5. 9. Group B, twenty-six student clinicians, acted as a control group. They used various testing tech niques, including Grays' Oral Reading Paragraphs and/or the Durrell-Sullivan Diagnostic Reading Test, to determine the problem of their pupils. Similarly, they used a variety of reading teaching techniques: reading with the child, various forms of opportunis tic word analysis, and filling in the hard words as the pupil read aloud. Group C was composed of 15 student clinicians. Their procedure was the same as Group A, using the Reading Skills Diagnostic Test and the Progres sive Choice Reading Material. They chose as a standardized test either the Gates Primary or Ad vanced Primary Reading Test, Form HI, Paragraph Reading. Group D (N = 33) used identical procedures to Group B, and acted as a control group for Group Co