The Effectiveness of a Color‐Coded, Onset‐Rime Decoding Intervention with First‐Grade Students at Serious Risk for Reading Disabilities

Abstract

This study was an investigation into the effectiveness of a color-coded, onset-rime-based decoding intervention with first-graders at serious risk for reading disabilities using a singlesubject multiple probe design. Students increased their ability to decode instructional words on average 73% over baseline. For novel words from instructed rime patterns, scores increased by an average of 56%. Transfer at the vowel level to uninstructed rime patterns was limited, with scores improving by an average of 29%. Students maintained decoding gains at 1-week and 1-month maintenance. While acknowledging the difficulty in predicting reading disabilities based on first-grade performance, the effectiveness of the early intervention is a promising step in finding an instructional approach that is successful with the most at risk or disabled students who often do not respond to effective remedial programs.

Colouring the path from instruction to practice

“…Berninger [3] and Hines [9] colour-highlighted letter-units to help students identify them in sentences or words. The colours seemed to help students focus attention to the target letter-units and bind them to their sounds.…”

“…Stable syllables always appear at the start (e.g., prefixes, such as "un") or end (e.g., suffixes, such as "ish", or "ble") of words. Like Hines [9] and Berninger [3], we highlighted stable units by colouring their letters uniformly. We extended their approaches by choosing colours for front and end syllables that suggested their positions: green, for "go", was assigned to "starting" units; red, for "stop", was assigned to end units.…”

Early Reading Instruction With Embedded Behavioral Supports for Children With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

“…Teaching students to decode new and unfamiliar words supports the reading skills of students with disabilities because successful decoding promotes text reading fluency and understanding of text when students are successful with automatic word recognition (Foorman et al, 2016). Phonics mastery takes time and consistent intervention, but an engaging activity that educators new to phonics who are supporting students with EBD can employ is an onset and rime sequence (Hines, 2009). The onset is the initial sound unit in a word, such as /b/ in the word bat.…”

Identifying At-Risk Students for Early Reading Intervention: Challenges and Possible Solutions

“…Young students enter the classroom with meaningful differences in early language (Hart & Risley, 1995) and literacy (Scarborough, 1998) skills, and targeted interventions focused on beginning reading can help students acquire the skills required to become successful readers. Intensive early reading instruction and intervention has been successful in increasing basic skills in kindergarten (see Cavanaugh, Kim, Wanzek, & Vaughn, 2004, for a review) and first grade (e.g., Hines, 2009;Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004;Pullen, Lane, Lloyd, Nowak, & Ryals, 2005). Common features of Tier 2 interventions include an increased duration of instruction (e.g., Harn, Linan-Thompson, & Roberts, 2008;O'Connor, 2000;Simmons et al, 2011;Simmons et al, 2007), highly explicit and scaffolded instruction (e.g., Hines, 2009;Jenkins et al, 2004;O'Connor, 2000;Simmons et al, 2007), and small groups (e.g., Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, 2000;Vellutino, Scanlon, Small, & Fanuele, 2006) or one-on-one tutoring (e.g., Al Otaiba, Schatschneider, & Silverman, 2005;Vadasy, Sanders, & Peyton, 2006).…”