The problem addressed in this study is whether children from lower SES homes would benefit in their reading and verbal skills through interaction with computer software that reads to them. If the verbal abilities and reading skills of a child increase as a result of an adult reading to him or her, would interactive storybook software provide similar results? / The rationale is twofold: (1) It has been demonstrated that one-to-one storybook read-aloud increases the literary skills of the child, but the teacher:student ratio in the kindergarten classroom and the time allotted weekly to the teacher to reach individual students limits this interaction; (2) Computer technology and highly interactive storybook software that reads to children are being introduced into the classrooms that allow children to actively participate in the reading process. / The major hypotheses are: (1) Interactive storybook software will facilitate the emergent storybook reading behaviors of kindergarten children from lower SES homes; (2) Interactive storybook software will increase the verbal abilities of these same children. / Subjects were randomly selected after a determination of SES was made. The design was a pretest-posttest control group design, using pretest scores from the Verbal Scale of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (1972) and Sulzby's Observation of Emergent Storybook Reading (1985) as covariates with posttest scores from the same instruments. The treatment took place in public school kindergarten classrooms equipped with CD ROM and MS-DOS hardware. The schools are located in a district in northern Florida. Each subject in the treatment group worked with the software three times a week for seven weeks. Storybook software was provided by Discis Knowledge Research, Inc. / The results of the study indicate that the software is significant in increasing the verbal abilities of children when they use it for 42 minutes a week for at least seven weeks. There were no significant results for emergent reading behaviors. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-11, Section: A, page: 4270. / Major Professor: Charles Hall Wolfgang. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77583 |
| Contributors | Johnston, Callum Barnett., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 129 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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