The Effectiveness of Remedial Programs for Reading Disabled Children of Different Ages: Does the Benefit Decrease for Older Children?

One hundred and twenty-two severely reading disabled children were randomly assigned to one of two word identification training programs or a study skills control program. One program remediated deficient phonological analysis and blending skills and provided direct instruction of letter-sound mappings. The other program taught children how to acquire, use, and monitor four metacognitive decoding strategies. The effectiveness of the remedial programs was evaluated for children in grades 2/3, 4, and 5/6 to determine whether programs were differentially effective at different grade levels. Both training approaches were associated with significant improvement in word identification and word attack skills and sizeable transfer-of-training effects. The phonological program resulted in greater transfer across the phonological processing domain, whereas the strategy training program produced broader transfer for real words of both regular and irregular orthography. Children at each grade level made equivalent gains with remediation. These results suggest that the phonological deficits associated with reading disability are amenable to focused and intensive remediation and that this effort is well directed across the elementary school years. From grades 2 through 6, there is no evidence of a developmental window beyond which phonological deficits cannot be effectively remediated with intensive phonological training.