Empirical Validation of PASS Reading Enhancement Program: An Indian Experience

This investigation was conducted to empirically validate Das’s PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous and Successive processing) Reading Enhancement Program (PREP) on Indian children with reading and spelling deficits. The study was conducted on 147, 4th to 6th Grade students drawn from various schools in Karnal and Kurukshetra districts of Haryana, India. Children scoring below 16th percentile on particular Wide Range Achievement Test-4 (WRAT 4) and Das Battery of Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) subtests were diagnosed as having deficit in reading and spelling. These selected children were then assigned randomly to Control (n=74) and Experimental (n=73) groups. Both experimental and control groups were tested on CAS and WRAT 4 in pre- and post-test conditions. The experimental group received PREP remedial intervention program for 4 months and then was retested on a parallel form of WRAT 4 and CAS. Results revealed that control group did not differ in pre- and post-test conditions in any of the areas of reading, spelling, and PASS processes. However, the experimental group recorded remarkable improvement in reading (t=7.98, p<.0001), spelling (t=6.44, p<.0001) and simultaneous (t=3.78, p<.001) and successive synthesis (t= 6.32, p<.0001). The findings provide an evidence for the validity of PREP in improving upon these areas of deficit among reading disabled children.