"Do Pictures Help Children Learn to Read?"

Abstract of a paper by Carolyn Sawyer

The literacy rate in the US is much lower than it should be. Learning to read is not easy, but by associating a symbol with a word, there is something more familiar for the person to remember every time they see the word. Thirty-two kindergarten and first grade students participated in this experiment. The students were separated into two groups. One group studied ten words with symbols associated with them, and the other group studied the same ten words with no symbols. The students studied the words in school and at home. The students were tested on whether they learned the words by reading a book containing all the words at the beginning and end of a two week period.

When the percentage point improvement of the two groups was compared, the group studying the words with symbols had improved to a greater extent on eight out of ten words. For the two words in which there was no improvement, both the control and experimental group knew the word to begin with, therefore, there was no room for improvement. Although the difference between the two groups was not dramatic, the results did show that the group studying words with symbols improved more than the group studying words without symbols. This project was done through the Curie Elementary School, kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Bassett, Mrs. DeSonia, Mrs. Sipe, Mrs. Harbright, Mrs. Commentz, and Mrs. Alvarez along with the help of Linda Sawyer.