Monday January 26, 2015 at 10:00 a.m.
Neville Scarfe, Room 308A
Title: Learning through action with embodied education: A multisensory component analysis in a phonological awareness intervention
Research Supervisor: Dr. Sterett Mercer (SCPS)
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Ruth Ervin (SCPS)
External Examiner: Dr. Laura Grow (SPED)
ABSTRACT
Multisensory components have been used across various educational approaches for many decades; however, the specific contribution of multisensory components is not well documented or explained, especially from an embodied education approach. Thus, an investigation of the effectiveness of adding a multisensory component (i.e., sandpaper letters) to a phonological awareness intervention (i.e., modified Road to the Code program; Blachman, Ball, Black, & Tangle, 2000) was conducted. To accomplish this, a multiple-baseline multiple-sequence design was used with six kindergarten students identified as needing remediating instruction, comparing instruction with and without the multisensory component while keeping instructional time constant. It was hypothesized that participants would show greater gains in literacy skills (i.e., naming letters, segmenting words into phonemes, and decoding phonetically regular words) following the intervention with the multisensory component, compared to the intervention without. The addition of a multisensory component (i.e., sandpaper letters) was time efficient and simple to implement, and appeared to result in differential growth for at least some students. Given that the addition of a modest multisensory component appeared to assist some students in improving their early literacy skills, results were consistent with theories of embodied cognition and suggested that a more robust multisensory intervention could be worth developing and researching further.