A kindergarten intervention study comparing rime and phoneme based programs and their effects on early literacy through computer literacy software : ABRACADABRA

This study investigates the use of a new literacy software ABRACADABRA with pre-reading kindergarten students. The participants ( n=27) from one school were assigned randomly to one intervention group (rime or phoneme) and (n=17) school two served as a control. Ten hours of either a rime or phoneme ABRACADABRA intervention were employed to compare overall effectiveness of the software with regular classroom instruction. All participants were pre-tested at the onset of the study and post-tested following the intervention using eight highly sensitive measures to detect change in word reading strategies and phonemic skills specific to the two delivery methods. Measures were developed from previous studies and included blending and segmenting of matched CV (consonant-vowel), VC (vowel-consonant) words, high and low rime nonsense word reading, rime and coda articulation tasks. The results showed improvement in both interventions over the control on Letter-Sound knowledge and a combined reading task with a large advantage to the phoneme intervention in blending of VC words