title: Errorless discrimination and picture fading as techniques for teaching sight words to TMR students.
abstract: The effectiveness of two approaches for teaching beginning sight words to 30 TMR students was compared. In Dorry and Zeaman's picture-fading technique, words are taught through association with pictures that are faded out over a series of trials, while in the Edmark program errorless-discrimination technique, words are taught through shaped sequences of visual and auditory--visual matching-to-sample, with the target word first appearing alone and eventually appearing with orthographically similar words. Students were instructed on two lists of 10 words each, one list in the picture-fading and one in the discrimination method, in a double counter-balanced, repeated-measures design. Covariance analysis on three measures (word identification, word recognition, and picture--word matching) showed highly significant differences between the two methods. Students' performance was better after instruction with the errorless-discrimination method than after instruction with the picture-fading method. The findings on picture fading were interpreted as indicating a possible failure of the shifting of control from picture to printed word that earlier researchers have hypothesized as occurring.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods