Collecting a Data Base for a Reading Technology.

A model for transforming data from verbal learning experiments into tables useful to an educational technician was developed, based on a similar one for scientific agriculture. The necessary data were obtained through two experiments replicated upon relevant populations. In the first study, a series of free-recall experiments were performed using the 1,000 most frequently used words as stimuli and 87 five-year-old children as subjects. These experiments provided a scaling of common words according to response availability which could be used in conjunction with measures of stimulus discriminability to select an optimum list of words to teach look-and-say learning. The second study was comprised of two experiments of a series to determine the optimum list for teaching phonic blendings. In the first experiment, 287 two-phoneme syllables were blended by 17 preschool children. In the second experiment, six groups of 20 preschool children received training with vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel blends presented in various orders. Tables, a rank ordering of words according to ease of recall, and references are included. (Author/DH)