Comparing the effects of group administered drill interventions on pre-kindergarten early literacy skills

ABSTRACT

Children who enter school with limited literacy skills risk falling behind their peers. Early intervention could be used to remediate this issue by increasing the literacy skills of children at an early age. Early literacy skills, such as alphabet knowledge, are some of the first reading skills that children are exposed to and are often cited as necessary foundational skills for reading fluency. Drill interventions have been successfully used to teach basic academic skills to young children, but there is limited research on their use with a pre-kindergarten population. The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of using drill interventions to increase the letter name knowledge of pre-kindergarten students. Sixty-six pre-kindergarten students participated in the study. Individual pre-assessments of letter name knowledge were given to all participants at the beginning of the study. Participants within each classroom were randomly assigned to one of four drill intervention conditions incremental rehearsal, interspersal, traditional drill, or the control group. Each group, not including the control, received a letter name intervention administered via small group instruction for approximately five minutes per day, one to four times per week. Participants were individually assessed on a weekly basis to measure rate of letter name acquisition. A split-plot factorial ANOVA revealed that there was no statistically significant difference in letter knowledge between intervention and control groups. In this study, drill intervention was not effective at increasing participant letter knowledge. Several limitations, including inconsistent length of intervention sessions, absenteeism among participants, and unexpected school closure due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, negatively impacted the results of the study. While the results of the current study were not statistically significant, they provide more information on the use of drill intervention with a pre-kindergarten population. Future research in this area should focus on increasing intervention integrity and consistent scheduling while maintaining participant attention and minimizing distractions. By doing so, future studies may result in more favorable outcomes and further implications for practice for this population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)