Phonological awareness and language intervention in preschoolers from low socio‐economic backgrounds: A longitudinal investigation

This study examines the literacy outcomes for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who had received specific whole‐class phonological awareness (PA) and language intervention in preschool. The participants were 57 children who had been involved in the original intervention study. Their PA skills, letter‐sound knowledge, real word and non‐word spelling and reading comprehension were assessed in Grade 2. The results indicated that children who had received intervention in preschool performed similarly to the children who had not received intervention. The gains made in PA and language skills post intervention had failed to augment further literacy development. A post hoc examination of individual student profiles, however, revealed that a subgroup of children who had received intervention had maintained their enhanced performance and that the intervention cohort had similar scores on tests of PA ability to their age‐matched peers in the population. It was concluded that whole‐class, teacher‐delivered, PA and language intervention, while effective in the short term, does not lead to a generalized improvement in literacy skills in Grade 2. Possible reasons for the failure of the program to produce medium term gains are discussed.     

Girls who use "masculine" problem-solving strategies on a spatial task: proposed genetic and environmental factors.

This study investigated strategy and performance differences between right-handed boys and girls on a mental rotation task. Based on predictions from Casey and Brabeck's (1990) theory of sex differences, the study was also designed to identify a target group of right-handed girls with the optimal combination of genetic and environmental factors (high math/science achievers with nonright-handed immediate relatives). They were predicted to show strategies and performance more similar to those of the boys than to those of both the low math/science achieving girls and the high math/science girls with all right-handed immediate relatives (predicted to have the nonoptimal genotype). Strategy preference was measured using selective interference, whereby subjects solved mental rotation items concurrently with either verbal or visual-spatial interference tasks. Group comparisons were made on the amount of decrement in mental rotation performance as a result of the two types of interference tasks. This provided a basis for comparing the groups on the use of visual-spatial or verbal strategies on the mental rotation task. The boys: (1) did not show a significant advantage over the girls on the mental rotation items, but (2) did depend more on visual-spatial strategies than the girls, and (3) depended less on verbal strategies than the girls. The target girls: (1) outperformed the low math/science achieving girls on the mental rotation items and did not show a significant advantage over the other high math/science group, (2) depended more on visual-spatial strategies than both the other two groups of girls, and (3) depended less on verbal strategies than the low math/science girls, while showing no significant difference compared to the nonoptimal high math/science girls. Examining within-group differences, the boys preferred visual-spatial strategies, while the girls in both the nontarget groups preferred verbal ones. However, for the target girls, no within-subject strategy differences were found. The present findings support the theory that, like the boys, the target girls depend more on visual-spatial strategies than do other girls. It is possible that the target girls use a combination of visual-spatial and verbal strategies when solving mental rotation tasks.