This study examined the effectiveness of embedded picture mnemonic alphabet
cards on the acquisition of letter name and letter sound knowledge with at-risk
kindergarten students in a rural Texas public school. The study compared student
achievement against a zero baseline when the student(s) are trained using a dissassociated
picture mnemonic to an embedded picture mnemonic. A secondary area of investigation
was the “Degree of Difficulty in Learning Letter Names” theory proposed by Treiman,
Tincoff, Rodriguez, Mouzaki, & Francis. The theory states that consonant letter names
can be divided into three categories based on phoneme characteristics: Easy to learn
letters have a consonant-vowel pattern (the letter name for “D” is /d/ /e/); hard letters
have a converse pattern of vowel-consonant (the letter name for “M” is /e/ /m/); and the
other category has no phoneme pattern reflective to the letter name (the letter name “W”
is “double” “you”).
Students were randomly selected to either the treatment or the control group and
after a ten-day (two week) training period, the students were given one week with no
intervention then administered a posttest, followed by another week with no intervention followed by a post-posttest. The purpose for this assessment design was to determine if
the training had an effect on long-term memory.
Results revealed that children taught with the embedded picture mnemonics
learned more letter name associations than did the control group. The embedded picture
mnemonic had a positive effect on long term memory reflecting an increase from a
moderate effect sizes for letter naming (d = .69) on the first week post test to a large
effect size for letter naming (d =1.12) on the second week post test. The results also
revealed inconclusive support for Treiman’s et al. (1998) degree of difficulty in learning
letter names theory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1100 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | White, Teresa |
| Contributors | Sadoski, Mark |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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