Results of Evaluations of Say Say Oh Playmate Do children improve their sight vocabulary by using Say, Say Oh Playmate? Can Say, Say, Oh Playmate motivate children who dislike reading to perform activities that rely heavily on children using their reading skills? Quicktime movies of students using the software are available for download. Do children improve their sight vocabulary by using Say, Say Oh Playmate? To determine if Say Say Oh Playmate was successful in achieving this goal, word gain was assessed by comparing reading ability during a pre and posttest. The figure below depicts students' performance on both the pre and posttest. Pre and Post Reading Test Scores As the graph illustrates, all students showed performance gains from pre to posttest. Mean performance on the pretest was 17 words out of 41 words for an average of 41 percent word gain. After one hour and thirty minutes use of the system, mean performance on the posttest was 26.7 words (65 percent), a word gain of 9.7 words or 24 percent. It is possible that the students could have had the same word gain by reading the lyrics with a tutor. However, given the constrainsts of working in our selected afterschool program where children select how to spend their time, we were unable maintain student interest long enough to gather reliable control group data using tutors as instructors, instead of a computer-based learning system. Say Say Oh Playmate was designed for students who are not motivated to read by traditional means, so it is not surprising that we were unable to engage students in a traditional tutoring session, without the aid of a computer-based learning system. The figure below depicts a histogram that shows a distribution in students’ gain in sight vocabulary. All students learned to read some words by using Say, Say Oh Playmate. The majority of students are clustered around the 8-10 words gained range. Histogram of students' gain in sight vocabulary words   Can Say, Say, Oh Playmate motivate children who dislike reading to perform activities that rely heavily on children using their reading skills? The motivational effects of Say Say Oh Playmate were also evaluated in the study. To answer the question we relied on data gathered from the pre and post interviews. A question in the post interview asked students to rank their top three software titles from a list educational software applications that are available in the after-school tutoring program’s computer lab. However, we do not have any data on whether or not the students had previously used each title. See the figure below for the results. The following formula was used to calculate students votes. Three points were given for every 1st place vote, two points for every 2nd place vote and one point for 3rd place votes. Students' ranking of popular software titles As the figure dictates, Say Say Oh Playmate was clearly the students’ favorite software title. It received all 12 first place votes. One plausible explanation for this ranking is the Hawthorne effect. Since the students had just used Say Say Oh Playmate they might have been more deposed to rank it higher because of its novelty. However, the amount of disparity between the rankings of Say Say Oh Playmate and other software applications provides some evidence as to the positive motivational effects of Say, Say Oh Playmate .