Jocelyne Giasson

Academic Achievement Effects of an in-Class Service Model on Students with and without Disabilities:

This article presents the results of a study designed to evaluate the impact of an in-class service model on the achievement of students at risk of school failure. The model, which included collaborative consultation, cooperative teaching, parent involvement, and strategic and adapted instruction was implemented for 1 school year in 13 different schools. Significant effects were found on writing scores for students at risk and on reading and mathematics scores for general education students. No significant treatment effects were detected for students with learning disabilities. The findings confirm the benefits of the in-class service model for some students and the need to pursue further research in order to achieve better results for the lowest achievers in the classroom.

Effects of a family literacy program adapting parental intervention to first graders’ evolution of reading and writing abilities

This article reports on the effects of a family literacy program for first graders that had three main characteristics: (1) book reading with parents that adapts parental intervention to the child’s gradually increasing skills in reading during the school year, (2) support for writing activities, and (3) enjoyable home activities complementing the in-class teaching. The 108 participants were assigned to two treatment conditions: Workshop and Control. Pre- and post-test group comparisons indicate that the workshop program has a positive effect on the children’s performance in both reading and writing. Children produced longer texts and used better vocabulary, sentence structure and spelling. This study provides new data supporting the utility of family literacy programs by demonstrating their positive effect on writing. This confirms the importance of connecting reading and writing activities in family literacy at the beginning of learning and that parents should be invited by the teacher to intervene in these two areas rather than only in reading.

Emergent Literacy and Intellectual Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a home-based emergent literacy program for children with intellectual disabilities. Twenty preschool children equally distributed between an experimental and comparison group participated in the study. Children were given a pretest and a posttest 8 months later. Assessment of childrens progress included measurement of emergent literacy knowledge, abilities and attitudes. Results show that the only item for which children in the experimental group had higher scores was pretend reading. Treatment effect is modest but promising considering the population studied. Benefits of the program are also discussed. Emergent literacy behaviors in the children in the study are compared with those reported for nondisabled students.

Effects of a Multicomponent Literacy Program and of Supplemental Phonological Sessions on At-Risk Kindergartners

In this study, a multicomponent literacy program for kindergarten classrooms was developed, implemented and its impact evaluated from the perspective of preventing reading failure and combining the approaches of emergent literacy and phonological awareness. The utility of adding phonological awareness sessions to the program was also assessed. Six classes composed of French-speaking children and located in a low SES area participated in the study, which included a comparison group. At the end of kindergarten, a significant treatment effect was found on Invented Spelling, Phonological Awareness and Reading Orientation. No significant effects on reading scores in Grade 1 were detected. Phonological sessions did not add to the treatment effect on phonological measures and reading scores. The findings confirm the benefits of emergent literacy programs with at-risk kindergartners and the need to pursue further research into strategies to improve the prevention of school failure.

Evolution of emergent reading behaviours in preschool children with developmental disabilities: a within‐individual examination

ABSTRACT The purpose of this short report is to analyse the within‐individual response to a stimulation programme conducted in a family environment on different measures of emergent reading over two years for eight children with intellectual disabilities. Graphs of the individual subjects’ evolution revealed progress in attitudes and abilities in emergent literacy behaviours. Development quotient and kindergarten attendance did not seem to be determining factors in the evolution of these behaviours. However, degree of parental compliance with the programme seemed to be related to better abilities in emergent literacy.

Épreuves informatisées des indicateurs des savoirs essentiels en lecture pour élèves francophones au début du primaire (INDISSE)

Cet article presente des epreuves informatisees en lecture pour les eleves francophones de la maternelle et le debut du primaire, les Indicateurs dynamiques des savoirs essentiels en lecture (INDISSE). Elles visent a identifier les eleves a risque de difficulte en lecture et a suivre le progres des eleves. Les qualites psychometriques ont ete verifiees aupres d’un echantillon compose de 1130 eleves evalues a trois reprises (debut, milieu et fin d’annee). Les eleves a risque, c’est-a-dire ceux dont le resultat a une des epreuves se situait sous le 40e rang centile, l’ont ete a cinq reprises. Des analyses multitraits-multimethodes soutiennent la validite de construit des epreuves. De plus, celles-ci sont correlees avec la reussite en lecture a la fin de l’annee et avec le jugement de l’enseignante. Leur validite predictive des scores a l’examen de fin de l’annee est plus elevee en maternelle (.56) et en 1re annee (.34) qu’en 2e (.26) et 3e annee (.26). Il en est de meme pour la validite predictive du jugement de l’enseignante en fin d’annee (maternelle, .79; 1re annee, .65; 2e annee, .44; 3e annee, .36). Par ailleurs, a tous les degres scolaires, elles sont de meilleurs predicteurs de la reussite que le jugement de l’enseignante en debut d’annee. Ces epreuves peuvent completer les informations des enseignantes venant de leurs propres observations en classe et leur apporter des donnees utiles quant aux savoirs essentiels des eleves pour leur reussite en lecture.

Le traitement morphologique dans l’écriture des mots chez les élèves de 6e année du primaire

EnglishThis paper presents the results of a study on the use of morphological information in spelling words among French speaking students in the late primary. The effect of three variables was tested: type of word, word frequency and spelling ability level. The experiment was conducted with 242 Grade 6 students, which were submitted to a spelling word task including three words types: 1. morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a feminine derivative revealed the silent ending, 2. morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which an another word revealed the silent ending, and 3. opaque words that had a silent consonant ending for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. In order to test the effect of spelling level ability, we divided the students in three groups based on the lexical decision score (Khomsi et al., 2006). The study revealed that the type of word and spelling level had a significant effect on spelling scores. The morphological words with a feminine derivative were spelled with more success than other types of words. The achievement gap between lexical frequent words and lexical rare words was higher than the achievement gap between morphological frequent words and morphological rare words. The good speller students obtained the best spelling scores on each of the three types of words. Finally students have made more omission errors for lexical words and more substitution errors for morphological words. francaisCet article presente les resultats d�une etude analysant l�ecriture de mots morphologiques chez des eleves francophones en fin de primaire. L�effet de trois variables sur l�ecriture de mots fut verifie : le type de mots, leur frequence et le niveau d�habilete orthographique des eleves. Au total, 242 eleves de 6e annee ont ete soumis a une version adaptee d�une epreuve de BELEC (Mousty et al., 1994) comprenant trois types de mots : 1. des mots morphologiques dont le morphogramme peut etre derive par la mise en application de ces mots au feminin, 2. des mots morphologiques dont le morphogramme peut etre deduit grâce a un mot de la meme famille semantique et 3. des mots lexicaux dont la consonne finale n�est pas derivable et qui doit etre memorisee. Dans l�epreuve, la moitie des mots est de haute frequence (mots frequents), et l�autre moitie, de basse frequence (mots rares). Pour verifier l�effet du niveau d�habilete des eleves, trois groupes furent constitues en fonction de leur score a une epreuve standardisee de decision lexicale (Khomsi et al., 2006). Les resultats des analyses revelent que le type du mot et le niveau d�habilete en orthographe ont un effet significatif sur les scores des eleves dans l�ecriture des mots. Les mots morphologiques possedant un derive feminin ont ete mieux orthographies que les autres types de mot. L�ecart de reussite entre les mots lexicaux frequents et rares a ete plus eleve que celui entre les mots morphologiques frequents et rares. Par ailleurs, ce sont les eleves avances en orthographe qui ont obtenu les meilleures performances, quel que soit le type de mot. Enfin, les eleves ont fait plus d�erreurs d�omission de la consonne finale pour les mots lexicaux et plus d�erreurs de substitution de la consonne finale des mots morphologiques.