Programed Tutoring: A Teaching Aid and a Research Tool

THIS IS A summary report of ten experiments in which the technique of programed tutoring, applied to the teaching of beginning reading, is developed and given preliminary field tests. The behavior of professionally untrained persons in this technique is programed in agreement with principles of learning and programed instruction for individual teaching. A total of 400 children were tutored in the experiments. They included retarded children, slow readers, and unselected populations of children in kindergarten and first grade, for periods up to one semester. With the exception of one normal firstgrader and some, but not all, of a small group of children with IQ's below 50, no tutored children failed to read. The data of several experiments indicated that programed tutoring is most successful when used as a supplement to and coordinated with regular classroom teaching. Used in this way, it produced significant improvement on standard tests which required sight-reading, comprehension, and word analysis.