“…It cannot be assumed that students will enter their first year of schooling without any knowledge of letter-sound associations (Nicholas & Paatsch, 2014). Further to this, the collection of entry data and project implementation occurred during the second school term, three months into the school year.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It is recognised that knowledge is personalised, often differing to the knowledge held by others (Cobb, 1994;Nicholas & Paatsch, 2014). It can therefore be appreciated why early users of digital technologies in education, acknowledging this newfound avenue through which to individualise learning, made use of drill and practice for closed "pre-determined learning goals", offering users instant feedback as they engaged in "self-paced learning" (Jones, 2009, n.p).…”
When integrated within a holistic literacy program, phonics applications can be used in classrooms to facilitate students' self-directed learning of letter-sound knowledge; but are they designed to allow for such a purpose? With most phonics software applications making heavy use of image cues, this project has more specifically investigated whether the design of the images used in such applications may impact on the effectiveness of their self-directed use in classrooms. Using a quasi-experimental study, we compared two types of pictorial mnemonics used in tablet applications, along with teacher-led activity in three first-year classrooms from the one school. The difference between teacher-led activity and integrated picture cues was significant, with teacher-led activity proving more effective. The difference between teacher-led activity and form-taking picture cues, however, was not statistically significant. Given that the outcomes of this small-scale study suggest that image design may be a significant design feature contributing to the educational value of using phonics applications in the classroom, we recommend that the design features of phonics software applications attract further research.
“…It cannot be assumed that students will enter their first year of schooling without any knowledge of letter-sound associations (Nicholas & Paatsch, 2014). Further to this, the collection of entry data and project implementation occurred during the second school term, three months into the school year.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It is recognised that knowledge is personalised, often differing to the knowledge held by others (Cobb, 1994;Nicholas & Paatsch, 2014). It can therefore be appreciated why early users of digital technologies in education, acknowledging this newfound avenue through which to individualise learning, made use of drill and practice for closed "pre-determined learning goals", offering users instant feedback as they engaged in "self-paced learning" (Jones, 2009, n.p).…”
When integrated within a holistic literacy program, phonics applications can be used in classrooms to facilitate students' self-directed learning of letter-sound knowledge; but are they designed to allow for such a purpose? With most phonics software applications making heavy use of image cues, this project has more specifically investigated whether the design of the images used in such applications may impact on the effectiveness of their self-directed use in classrooms. Using a quasi-experimental study, we compared two types of pictorial mnemonics used in tablet applications, along with teacher-led activity in three first-year classrooms from the one school. The difference between teacher-led activity and integrated picture cues was significant, with teacher-led activity proving more effective. The difference between teacher-led activity and form-taking picture cues, however, was not statistically significant. Given that the outcomes of this small-scale study suggest that image design may be a significant design feature contributing to the educational value of using phonics applications in the classroom, we recommend that the design features of phonics software applications attract further research.
“…The concept of readying early years children for academic success, basing educational practice on the content that children will encounter in assessments rather than on children's assessment results, was a practice that was evidenced in Nicholas and Paatsch [6]-the study that preceded this paper. The teachers of the five foundation-year classrooms that featured in Nicholas and Paatsch [6] used school-mandated standardized letter-identification assessments at the end of each child's first year of schooling. Results from the year that preceded the study showed that only 54 percent of foundation-year children were able to name each upper-and lower-case letter of the alphabet (52 letter symbols) and give a common sound for each (52 letter sounds) [6].…”
Section: The Study Contextmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…There is no question that assessments are useful tools for teachers when planning for teaching and learning [6]. However, in light of research that has found that some teachers teach to the test [4,5], with some early childhood educators targeting specific readingrelated outcomes in isolation [7], there is concern that pressure to ensure that children (and schools) will perform well in national literacy tests may devolve the teaching and learning of reading into a narrow objective to meet particular reading outcomes, 'readying' children from a younger and younger age to meet expected outcomes in their future schooling.…”
Research has shown that schoolteachers often prepare children for success in standardized reading assessments by ‘teaching to the test.’ Concurrently, research exploring children’s emergent literacies and ‘school readiness’ has shown that early childhood teachers often feel pressured to ‘prepare’ children for school and may do so by focusing on print-related literacies, to the detriment of earlier stages of the oral-to-print continuum. This raises the concern that teaching children as a group, preparing them for the next ‘stage of education,’ will disadvantage children who are working below or above expected levels of development. Our study explores the teaching approaches used with a group of foundation-year children who achieved more advanced reading outcomes than children from four adjacent classrooms in their first year of schooling. We collected the reading and letter-identification outcomes of 16 children in the teacher’s foundation-year class and interviewed her about her practices. Findings showed that the teacher used her knowledge of what the children should achieve in standardized assessments as a minimum expectation and moved beyond the content of such assessments when warranted, as determined by informal assessments. As a result, every child in the class met, and many exceeded, minimum reading standards by year’s end. We conclude that using an individualized, child-centred pedagogy, informed by a combination of standardized and informal assessments, allowed the teacher to support her students to develop a range of reading abilities and to reach their full potential.
“…through audio‐visual songs and/or during shared reading experiences). Others require more targeted and extended support to develop this initial phase of awareness (Nicholas and Paatsch, 2014); an awareness that is based upon the fact that, “ phonological segmentation and alphabetic coding skill are in a tightly intertwined reciprocal relationship in the early stages of reading acquisition and that these skills are mutually facilitative ” ( Stanovich and Stanovich, 1995, p. 95).…”
Learning to read is a process that begins well before children commence formal schooling and well before children learn to decode print. Children's early reading skills are, first and foremost, foundationally contingent upon children's oral language and phonological awareness proficiencies – skills that can be mapped across a continuum of development from speech‐to‐print. Nine educators from Victoria, Australia, were interviewed, asked to share their understandings and planning for literacy learning when working with 2–3‐year‐old children. Findings showed that the educators exposed children to opportunities to develop their communication and oral language skills, privileging general conversation and storybook reading. However, some educators appeared unaware of the various stages of phonological awareness and/or appeared to privilege phonics over and above earlier stages of development. The authors recommend that educators, managers and course designers seeking to support young children's emergent literacy development use a framework such as the one presented in this paper to evaluate their knowledges/practices/programmes and that further, larger scale research be conducted that compares educators' interview data with what they do in practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
