dy is justified because it fills a gap in the existing research and because that research which does exist supports the idea that investigating SARP for special needs populations may be of true benefit to the populations.
Due to the fact that, in general, existing research is supportive of improvement in reading and writing skills, the assumption underlying this study was that SARP would lead to increase in subjects' language skills. Based on this assumption, the following hypotheses were formulated:
Hypothesis 1 - Posttest measures of reading comprehension (as measured by the reading comprehension subscale of the Metropolitan Achievement Test) will be higher than pretest measures of reading comprehension for the group of students exposed to the SARP technique.
Hypothesis 2 - Posttest measures of reading ability (as measured by the Informal Graded Word Recognition Test) will be higher than pretest measures of reading ability for the group of students exposed to the SARP technique.
Hypothesis 3 - Posttest measures of writing ability (as measured by the Picture Story Language Test) will be higher than pretest measures of writing ability for the group of students exposed to the SARP technique.
Hypothesis 4 - Posttest measures of reading ability observed for students exposed to SARP will be higher than Posttest measures of reading ability observed for a group of comparison control subjects.
Hypothesis 5 - Posttest measures of reading level observed for students exposed to SARP will be higher than Posttest measures of reading level observed for a group of comparison control subjects.
Hypothesis 6 - Posttest measures of writing ability observed for students exposed to SARP will be higher than Posttest measures of writing ability observed for a group of comparison control subjects.
It is important to point out here that the judgments of groups of scores as "higher" will be reasoned judgments based on examination of tes...