The Effectiveness of a Total Environment Room on an Early Reading Program for Culturally Different Pre-School Children.

The purpose of this study was to measure the gains that culturally different 4-year-old children made in reading readiness activities and the acquisition of a sight vocabulary when exposed to an extensive prekindergarten reading intervention program. The subjects of the study were selected initially from a group of volunteer families. The subjects and treatments were then randomly assigned to one of two groups, experimental or control. Subjects for the experimental group consisted of 20 culturally different black children. Subjects for the control group consisted of the same number of culturally different black children. The experimental group was taught word recognition in a Total Environment Room, which was equipped to provide a multisensory environment. The control group was taught word recognition by a method approximating the traditional way of teaching sight vocabulary. The duration of the experiment was 125 days. The findings suggest that the Total Environment Room group did significantly improve in reading readiness, IQ, and sight vocabulary in comparison with the control group. (Author/WR)