An Examination of a Precision Teaching Model Within a Response to Intervention Framework Addressing Early Literacy Development of Young Children Within a Marginalised Community

Abstract

Fluency is accepted as key to our learners success, however, there are both several gaps within the fluency literature regarding establishing effective interventions and within applied practice, that need to be addressed. This research programme aimed to examined the effectiveness of a Precision Teaching intervention within an RTI framework targeting early literacy skills for at-risk learners. This is the first application of a Tier 2 PT intervention targeted literacy skills within a group design within an Irish context. Secondly, the contextually rich data offered by the standard celeration chart was examined both within and between conditions for all participants, to explore the true experimental effect of the intervention package and to examine the learning picture offered in response to the intervention package. To our knowledge, this Study was the first evaluation of an array of behavioural metrics of the standard celeration chart, inclusive of error rates, across the four bedrock skills of literacy with the findings valuable to developing our understanding of behavioural fluency. Thirdly, the definition of fluency requires maintenance of performance in the absence of intervention, however, the majority of fluency research examines per- and post- scores and rarely reports all four critical outcomes of behavioural fluency. To our knowledge this study was the first group review of RESA (i.e., retention, endurance, stability, and application) critical outcomes across the four bedrock skills of literacy at both a 6-8 week and 16-18 week follow-up. The final focal point of this research programme was to examine if generalised effects on the advanced skill of decoding occurred following the introduction of an intervention package targeting the basic skills of letter-sound knowledge and multi-letter grapheme-phoneme conversions. Measures were also employed to investigate the contribution of the PT intervention package, within a RTI framework, concerning the acquisition of reading and bedrock literacy skills, principally decoding, as well as reading motivation, self-concept, an estimate of general cognitive ability, and in-class behaviour.