The Stop and Go Phonemic Awareness Game: Providing Modeling, Practice, and Feedback

Abstract

The authors demonstrate the use of curriculum-based measurement, specifically Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), to identify and evaluate the progress of 6 kindergarten students who are experiencing difficulty with phonemic awareness. The Stop and Go Game, a blending and segmenting intervention, is individually implemented by a paraprofessional for an average of approximately 26 mins per day per student. A multiple-baseline design is used to evaluate the effects of the intervention on phoneme segmentation fluency over the course of the study. With minimal training, the paraprofessional provides individual phonemic awareness instruction using the specified intervention with integrity. All students made gains in phoneme segmentation fluency, with most reaching and exceeding benchmark. The author discusses implications of the study for practice, limitations of the study, and directions for future research.

Keywords:

• at-risk
• elementary and early childhood
• game-based instruction
• paraprofessional
• phonemic awareness