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Exploring the relative effectiveness of functionally embodied and non-functionally embodied early literacy interventions

University of British Columbia

The theory of embodied cognition provides a precise explanation for the positive effects of multisensory instruction methods, which are widely implemented for early literacy acquisition. Embodied instruction methods show great promise in learning across academic areas but have yet to be directly applied to the field of early literacy skills. The purpose of the current study is to examine the relative effectiveness of functionally embodied and non-functionally embodied early literacy interventions. An adapted alternating treatment design comparing a functionally embodied and a non-functionally embodied early literacy intervention was conducted with three elementary aged students demonstrating difficulty with early literacy. Accuracy of pseudoword CVC wordlist decoding increased at a higher rate and the number of trials to mastery was smaller for the functionally embodied condition compared to the non-functionally embodied condition with three demonstrations of the effect by two participants and one demonstration by the third participant. Additionally, all three participants showed improvements in phonics knowledge and broad reading skill from pre to post intervention. These findings have important implications for the use of embodied instructional techniques in education and for the use of theory to derive intervention practices.

Text

2019-10-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71845

School Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/