The PASS Reading Enhancement Program (PREP) is a remedial program for primary school-aged children who are experiencing difficulties with reading, spelling, and comprehension. It is based on the PASS theory of intelligence and should be understood within the framework provided by the PASS theory.
The training tasks in PREP are aimed at improving the information-processing strategies that underlie reading, namely, simultaneous and successive processing, while avoiding the direct teaching of word-reading skills.
Attention and planning are important aspects of the program. Specifically, attention is required to perform each task, and planning skills are developed by encouraging the children to discuss their strategies and solutions both during and following the tasks.
Strategies such as rehearsal, categorization, monitoring of per-formance, prediction, revision of prediction, sounding, and sound blending are integral parts of each task. Thus, by working through the tasks, children develop their ability to use these strategies. Rather than being explicitly taught, the children are encouraged to become aware of their use of strategies through a discussion of what they are doing. Growth in ability to use the strategies and awareness of appropriate opportunities for use are expected to develop over the course of the remediation.
The Structure and Content of PREP
The program in its recently published edition consists of eight tasks which vary considerably in content and in what they require of the child. Each task involves both a global training component and a curriculum-related bridging component. The global component consists of structured nonreading tasks that require the application of simultaneous or successive strategies. These tasks also provide children with the opportunity to internalize strategies in their own way, thus facilitating transfer (Das, Mishra, and Pool, 1995). The bridging component involves the same cognitive demands as its global component, and provides training in simultaneous and successive processing strategies that are closely linked to reading and spelling (Das, Naglieri, and Kirby, 1994).
The global tasks begin with content that is familiar and non-threatening so that strategy acquisition occurs in small stages (Das, Naglieri, and Kirby, 1994). Complexity is introduced gradually and only after a return to easier content. Through verbal mediation, which occurs through a discussion of specific strategies used, the children are encouraged to apply their chosen strategies to academic tasks such as word decoding. The global and bridging components are further divided into three levels of difficulty. This allows the child to progress in strategy development and, for those who already have some successful processing strategies in place, to begin at an appropriate level.
A system of prompts is also integrated into each global and bridging component. The prompts support and guide the child to ensure that he/she completes the tasks successfully with minimal assistance. A record of these prompts provides a monitoring system for teachers/facilitators to determine when the material is too difficult for the child or alternatively when the child is ready to progress to a more advanced level. If the child does not complete at least 80 percent of the tasks successfully, an alternative set of tasks at the same difficulty level is used to provide the additional training required.
Who is Most Likely to Benefit from PREP?
As discussed in the preceding chapters, a number of children who are highly motivated, emotionally well adjusted, and who have a supportive family environment, nonetheless experience reading difficulties. Broadly speaking, these children can be classified into two groups. The groups are similar, as children in both are unable to read at the level expected for their grade. The larger group comprises of children whose reading difficulties arise from a wide array of weaknesses in cognitive functioning, while children in the smaller group can be classified as dyslexic readers.
How do we know, to which of the two groups a child belongs? The poor reader from the larger category is likely to struggle in other subjects that do not require a lot of reading, and may perform poorly on a wide variety of intellectual tasks. By contrast, the dyslexic child has specific cognitive processing difficulties that are related to converting spelling to speech, that is, phonological coding. Both types can benefit from PREP, but for children with attention deficit and/or severe difficulties in planning, PREP will only be effective if supplemented by appropriate treatment programs.