The Effect of Three Methods of Presentation and Socioeconomic Class on Recognition Performance in the Presentation of Low Frequency Words to Kindergarteners

A word recognition task was presented to 72 lower social class and 72 upper-middle social class kindergarteners who were randomly assigned to one of 3 methods (Word, Word Picture, or Word Object) and were asked to learn to recognize eight low frequency words. There were significant differences between lower and upper socioeconomic levels and among the three methods (p<.01). The Word Method was superior to the Word Picture and Word Object Methods (p<.05) for children from both lower and middle class schools and students from upper socioeconomic level schools scored higher than those from the lower socioeconomic schools (p<.01). In recent years much emphasis has been placed on the importance of using concrete learning experiences in the elementary school (Dale, 1946; Carpenter, 1953); however, there has been little research supporting this emphasis. Research concerning the acquisition of vocabulary words (King and Muehl, 1965; Samuels, 1967) indicates that concrete learning experiences do not aid, and in some cases, hinder learning. Specifically related to the present research, Ollila and Olson (1972) investigated the effectiveness of three different methods of presenting words to children who were beginning to recognize words. The word method produced the most efficient learning rate followed by the word picture and word object methods. There were two major limitations to this study. First, all the pupils came from an upper-middle class school. Second, the words used were ones already familiar to many of the children. The present study explores the effectiveness of different methods of presentation using low frequency words with white children of both lower and middle socioeconomic backgrounds. It is hypothesized that: 1) Performance using the Word Method of Reprints may be requested from D.N. Walker, Bay Area Guidance Center, 609 S. Monroe, Bay City, Michigan 48708. by guest on November 4, 2016 jlr.sagepub.com Downloaded from 304 Journal of Reading Behavior X, 3 presentation is significantly higher than performance using the Word Object or Word Picture Methods. 2) Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds will learn to recognize fewer words than those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.