Setting
Students worked in groups of 4 around a single computer. A trained facilitator was present to guide and support the students.
Study sample
Among participants in the sample, 64% were spoken and/or read to in a language other than English or French at home.
Intervention Group
The ABRACADABRA sessions occurred 4 times per week for 20 weeks. Students worked in groups of 4 around a single computer. A trained facilitator supported the students and guided them through the process and worked with both a synthetic and an analytic phonics group. Intervention duration varied by group: On average, students received 13 hours of instruction with the software (range 11-15 hours). A consistent schedule was used for both intervention groups: Animated alphabet (2 minutes), core activity (4 minutes), story/comprehension activity (8 minutes), core activity (3 minutes), and reward activity (2 minutes). In all, 35% of each session was devoted to phonics activities while the other 65% was devoted to alphabet, fluency, and comprehension activities. The Animated Alphabet demonstrated to the students how to write a letter, and provided an alliterative phrase to associate with it. The facilitator encouraged students to repeat the sentence, make other words that start with the letter, or come up with clues to have the other students guess the letter. The core activity came next and focused on word attack strategies. Students practiced phonics twice in each session until their correct response rate was 80% as a group for 3 consecutive sessions. At that point, the students progressed to the next level or switched to a different phonics activity. The next activity was reading a story and took several sessions to get through. Students were able to read individually, as a group, and also read repeatedly. The program provided varied levels of support, including having a word or page read by the narrator. Prediction, Comprehension Monitoring, Sequencing, and Story Response activities were included to enhance fluency by allowing the children to engage in higher level comprehension skills by discussing the plot, characters, and themes of the story. A fun reward activity of the students' choosing (e.g., Letter-Sound Search, Alphabet Song, Letter Bingo, or High-Frequency Words) ended each session. While the structure of the program was consistent, facilitators had the flexibility to respond to interests, ability levels, and dynamics of each small group. Facilitators could build lessons around the needs of their groups and offer repeated practice to students who had not mastered particular concepts.
Synthetic Phonics focused on developing students' skills at blending and segmenting words at the level of the individual phoneme unit. During the Animated Alphabet activity, students were introduced to six letters per week and practiced the letter-sound associations through Auditory blending (blending sounds together to choose a matching picture), Blending Train (identifying a word by blending its letter-sounds), Basic Decoding (sounding out and reading words), and Auditory Segmenting (matching words to their segmented sounds). Each activity had a series of levels to allow students to advance to more complex phonemic structures of words as their skill improved.
Analytic Phonics introduced letter sounds slowly to allow students to explore the sounds more in depth, getting students to recognize and generate rhyming words as well as manipulating the rime unit in words. Activities included Same Word (identifying similar words based on their sound), Word Matching (matching word cards by their beginning sounds), Rhyme Matching (matching words that rhyme), Word Families (making words from the same word family by changing the first letter), and Word Changing (manipulating word families to form a new word) and focused on having students learn to attend to initial sounds, recognize rhyming words, and explore shard spelling patterns of word families.
Comparison Group
Students in the control group received regular classroom instruction while students in the intervention groups participated in the intervention.
Support for implementation
The study mentions that a trained facilitator guided and supported students. The trained facilitators were graduate students in education who were trained by the research team running the study. The majority were teachers or early years educators and were given training on how to effectively manage small groups of children.