Computer-assisted teaching of sight-word recognition for mentally retarded school children.

A computer-assisted training program used to teach a sight vocabulary to mildly mentally retarded school children was described and evaluated. The training program was designed to supplement conventional methods of teaching by using aspects of computer technology to implement various learning principles that would otherwise be difficult to employ. Eight children were taught associations between the written and spoken versions of words by a "talking" computer. These children increased their sight vocabularies by an average of 128 percent; a comparison group had a 34 percent increase. Furthermore, this increase remained constant for over 23 weeks following the completion of the nonintensive 4-week training program.