Learning Principles and Procedures Applied to Remedial Reading with Normal and Educable Mentally Retarded Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Grade Children

This study was designed to further validate the Staats remedial reading procedures and to demonstrate their generality by extending their application to a population of pre- and early-adolescent retarded readers. The subjects consisted of 32 students from fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classrooms and 16 subjects of equivalent chronological age from special classes for the mentally retarded. The subjects were assigned to eight different treatment groups. The eight groups were defined by all possible combinations of three dichotomous factors--type of subject, type of reinforcement, and treatment. In general, the 24 experimental subjects participated in a manner substantiating the motivational effects of the extrinsic reinforcers. The mean number of reading responses made during the experiment was over 51,000. A mean of 550 new (unknown) words was presented with an average retention rate of 79 percent of these words on a short-term retention test and 54 percent on a long-term test. The results indicated that the experimental subjects scored significantly higher on a 100-item word recognition task and made a smaller percentage of errors in a prose reading task than did the control subjects. (WR)