Computer assisted instruction to prevent early reading difficulties in students at risk for dyslexia: Outcomes from two instructional approaches

The last three decades have been a period of enormous growth in our understanding of early reading development (National Reading Panel, 2000; Raynor, Foorman,Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2002; Stanovich, 2000). For instance, we now have a much clearer understanding of the way that early growth in phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter-sound correspondences support growth in the ability to read text accurately (Share & Stanovich, 1995). We also have more explicit knowledge about the connections between early growth of phonemic decoding skills and later development of reading fluency (Ehri, 2002), and we also know more about the relationships between fluency of reading text and growth of reading comprehension (Samuels & Farstrup, 2006).