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The meaningful applied phonics (M.A.P.) program is a prescriptive, explicit, teacher-directed approach, designed to introduce the alphabetic principle by teaching the 70 graphemes that make up the 26 letters, and the strategies used to segment and blend words into syllables. Seven schools were selected by a western Canadian school board to implement the program and form the treatment group. The treatment group was taught the M.A.P. program and was followed in a longitudinal study from Grades 1 to 3, and their performance was compared to that of a matched control group who were taught a more balanced program. The seven schools maintained their relative ranking, although their performance declined when compared to the normative samples used for the criterion measures. No systematic effect of gender on achievement was found. The children in the control group outperformed the children in the treatment (M.A.P.) group.
Volume 1, #1, Article 2: Potential risks to reading posed by high-dose phonics (PDF, 378 KB)
Linda M. Phillips is Professor and Director of the Canadian Centre for Research on Literacy, Killam Annual Professor at the University of Alberta and was Principal Investigator on this study.
Stephen P. Norris is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Scientific Literacy and the Public Understanding of Science, Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, and was co-investigator on this study.
Dorothy J. Steffler is Associate Professor of Psychology at Concordia University College of Alberta and was the coordinator of the data collection for and co-investigator on this study.
Phillips, L. M., Norris, S. P., & Steffler, D. J. (2007, April). Potential risks to reading posed by high-dose phonics. Journal of Applied Research on Learning, 1, 1, Article 2, pp. 1-18.