Developmental kindergarten classroom intervention for spatial relational terms.
Maggie Eising, Courtney Karasinski
PMID 35544882WHAT IT FOUND
After five weekly classroom lessons, more than half of the children who did not know targeted spatial words at pre-test identified them at post-test.
No control group means this is not proof the lessons caused the gains.
Key findings
01More than half of the children who did not understand first, front, last, behind, center, below, under, or right before the lessons correctly identified pictures for those words after the lessons.
02Around and left were the only two of the ten words not learned by more than half of the children who did not understand them before the lessons.
03Language group was not associated with whether children who did not know a word before the lessons knew it after the lessons.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used one developmental kindergarten class and did not report a separate comparison group. Only 14 children were tested, and one child was not tested because of absences. All tested children were Caucasian monolingual English speakers in a rural school district where 62.2% of children were economically disadvantaged. The lessons were delivered by a speech-language pathology student, and the same person gave the post-test. The small sample and lack of comparison group make it hard to tell whether gains were due to the lessons, normal development, or testing.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the post-test gains as proof that the lessons caused them. The paper describes a class receiving lessons and does not report a separate comparison group.