Hypothesis
It was hypothesized that the use of iPad applications would assist in the development of students’ phonemic awareness, automaticity of letter naming, fluent letter sound identification, high-frequency word recognition, and nonsense word reading as measured by the Marie Clay Observation Survey Letter Identification subtest; AIMSweb Letter Naming, Letter Sound, Phoneme Segmentation, and Nonsense Word Fluency subtests; Qualitative Reading Inventory–5 (QRI-5) Word Lists; and a teacher-made high-frequency word list from the Scott Foresman Reading Street curriculum. It was also anticipated that using an iPad to practice reading subskills would be highly engaging and motivating for students. With the capacity to differentiate instruction, the iPad promoted independence among struggling readers and encouraged positive attitudes towards learning. It was hypothesized that this investigation would possibly yield results to support iPad applications to be an effective means of transmitting literacy instruction that would foster the development and automaticity of early reading subskills to set a foundation for fluent reading success.