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Article Critique

Cynthia McLain
Department of Education & Counseling, Longwood University
READ 650 Evaluation of Literacy Research
Dr. Angelica D. Blanchette
March 5, 2023

Cassady, J. C., Smith, L. L. (2004). Acquisition of blending skills: Comparisons among body-
coda, on-set rime, and phoneme blending tasks. Reading Psychology, 25, 261–272.
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Article Critique

This article reports on a study completed in the midwestern United States with 189

kindergarten students from three different schools. Two of the schools were in small communities and

served mostly Caucasian students and the third school was in the suburbs of a large city an served a more

diverse population. All students were English proficient. The study explored kindergarteners’ acquisition

of blending skills in three different subsets. The results demonstrated that kindergarten children

consistently gained proficiency for blending body-coda stimuli prior to onset-rime stimuli and phonemes.

Although the students were from three separate schools, more detail about gender and race would

be beneficial. The study did not state if these students were struggling, on grade level, or above grade

level which speaks to external validity and transferability of the results. Throughout the study, there is no

mention of a control group which questions internal validity credibility. All three schools target blending

tasks as a primary literacy building activity. The teachers of these students reported that onset-rime

blending was part of their instruction with very little attention given to phoneme blending. There was no

mention of the frequency or consistency for these blending tasks. How much prior blending experience

the students had was not explained or revealed. A student that has blending tasks daily compared to a

student that has minimal would impact whether the results could be generalized. This practice questions

treatment fidelity. A baseline for the students should have been established and then reported. The

blending subsets of the Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness was used in analysis.

Despite these limitations, I do agree with the results of the study, and it provides some useful

information. The authors state that when beginning to train in blending, begin with the larger units and

then move to more complex tasks like phoneme blending. Further studies that replicate this one using a

control group are needed to understand the process of the acquisition of blending skills.