Specific Aspects of Prompting and Fading Procedures in Teaching Beginning Reading

Abstract

Three groups of kindergarten children received 4 training trials and a word-recognition test with 15 words in a beginning-reading task. There was a prompting-and-fading group with pictorial prompts which were gradually faded. There was a prompting-only group who received the same pictorial prompts but no fading. There was a no-prompting group, also, who were exposed to the printed words but no pictorial prompts. The prompting-and-fading and the prompting-only groups maintained few errors during training, while the no-prompting group showed high initial errors which gradually declined. The prompting-and-fading and the no-prompting groups performed similarly on word recognition after training and scored significantly higher than the prompting-only group. Lack of advantage in word-recognition skills for the prompting-and-fading group over the no-prompting group was discussed.