Interview with Diane Browder, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, and Principal Investigator of Project RAISE, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Share:
Linda Schreiber: Today I am interviewing Diane Browder, Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. She is the Principal investigator of Project RAISE (Reading Accommodations and Interventions for Students with Emergent Literacy). This federal grant evaluates the effect
Linda Schreiber: Today I am interviewing Diane Browder, Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. She is the Principal investigator of Project RAISE (Reading Accommodations and Interventions for Students with Emergent Literacy). This federal grant evaluates the effectiveness of early literacy curriculums for students who have moderate-to-severe developmental disabilities. Diane, tell me about Project RAISE.
Diane Browder: As you know, there's been big push for all students to learn to read, to improve literacy skills for all students in America's schools. And partly because of that, the Institution for Education Sciences in the Department of Education earmarked money for reading centers for students who have developmental disabilities. Three national centers were funded and one of them is Project RAISE at the University of North Carolina here in Charlotte. We focus specifically on students who have moderate and severe disabilities. And we focus on early literacy skillsemergent literacy skillsand on ways through research to build those skills step-by-step towards reading. We're hoping that by the end of five years, a substantial number of the students in our project will have begun to read. That's a new and ambitious goal compared to what the expectations have been for this population in this past.
Linda: What have expectations been for this population?
Diane: In the past, we perhaps targeted learning a few functional sight words for being able to cope in the community but didn't really target the skills to become literate. We're hoping that if we start early in the early elementary school ages and if we build reading one step at a time using scientific research on reading, that we'll be able to have more students break that barrier and learn to read.
Linda: Have you researched what's been done with this population of students?
Diane: Our research began with exploring the literature on how to teach reading to students with moderate and severe disabilities. In that comprehensive review, we found all the literature that existed on reading for this school-age population. We went back as far as 1975 to the current time. It was a substantial body of research, over 100 studies. We compared the studies and their focus to the components the National Reading Panel identified as the components of readingthose that are needed for a person to become literate. What we found was a strong emphasis on sight word reading.
Linda: Which perhaps explains why sight word reading has been the past goal for this population.
Diane: Yes, the assumption was that the students might learn a few sight words for functional living but probably would not become readers. We know from the National Reading Panel research that some development of sight vocabulary is certainly important but to only provide sight word instruction is to place a ceiling on students' literacy skills.
The other interesting thing about the research that I found startling is how few of those studies focused on comprehension of the sight words. We had many studies in which students learned to identify words but very few in which students learned to use them in meaningful ways.
Linda: And what did you find regarding the other components identified by the National Reading Panel?
Diane: We did find a few studies with some of the other components of reading, but for one of the components of reading we know is most importantphonemic awareness (which predicts early reading success)we found almost no studies in which students with moderate-to-severe disabilities had been taught phonemic awareness skills. We found a few studies on phonics, enough to know that the population can learn phonics when it's taught systematically but not enough to really provide a research base for how to teach reading using a phonics-based approach, which is what the National Reading Panel would recommend.
Linda: And from this meta-analysis of the literature, you formed some general principles about what ought to be the components of a curriculum for this population?
Diane: From the meta-analysis of this research on this population, combined with the research on how children typically acquire reading skills, we realized that these students needed a comprehensive curriculum for learning to read. We know from current research too that there has been a very small focus on literacy for this population. There have been case studies, for example, done in classrooms with students who have moderate-to-severe disabilities, that found very little time is spent on literacy skills. Also, if you look at textbooks, up until recently, there hasn't been much guidance on how to teach reading skills to this population. We knew that teachers were not going to have a lot of background on how to teach early literacy skills and reading skills to the population. And we knew that if they taught literacy, their experience was primarily going to be focused on teaching sight words for every day use. This is a good goal but not the only goal of learning how to read.
We realized students were going to need a comprehensive curriculum that addressed those components of reading that have been identified by the National Reading Panel. And to do the research, we were going to need a curriculum that looked at phonemic awareness. But the curriculum might have to go even beyond and below the level of individual phonemes; it might have to consider some phonological awareness of the concept of word or syllable. And it would need a strong focus on print awareness because we were going to face a big challenge in applying the research to this population.
Linda: And you addressed even one more issue. You examined the needs of nonverbal students.
Diane: We had not found any research or any published curriculum that had focused on the challenge of students being nonverbal. Many students with moderate-to-severe disabilities use alternative or augmentative communication systems and they need a way to demonstrate emerging skills and phonemic awareness and phonics that aren't reliant on a verbal response, yet show a clear understanding of the skill. We were looking at a way that we could translate skills into receptive responses that could be made nonverbally using communication systems, voice output systems, or picture selection so students would be able to show their skills as they progressed forward. We also realized though that skills like phonemic awareness and phonics might not have meaning for students with moderate-to-severe disabilities if presented in isolation. A lot of the very powerful research we know from that meta-analysis relied on a systematic instruction approach. We know it's important that students have many opportunities to respond and receive prompting and it would have been feasible to present phonemic awareness skills, for example with many trials and prompting, but I doubt that it would have had any meaning for the students with moderate-to-severe disabilities.
Linda: So how did you account for that?
Diane: What we decided was necessary was that the new emerging literacy skills have meaning. The most functional context for reading skills, of course, is a story and so by using stories, children can learn the new skillslike phonemic awareness and print awarenessand immediately apply their skills in the context of the story.
Linda: So you and your coauthorsSusan Gibbs, Lynn Ahlgrim-Delzell, Ginevra Courtade, and Angel Leecreated the Early Literacy Skills Builder, a curriculum that includes all of those important components. In our next interview, which will be posted on the SpeechPathology.com website on March 17, 2008, I will have you describe the curriculum in more detail, but for now, tell us about the research that will gather evidence that the curriculum is actually working.
Diane: In addition to the Early Literacy Skills Builder being based on a foundation of research, it was important to us to also validate it with research. It was important to use a research design that would be as powerful as possible to make a statement about how well this curriculum can work for this populationfor students who have moderate and severe disabilities. So we chose to use a group design with randomized trials; students in our current research are randomly assigned to either receive the Early Literacy Skills Builder or another curriculum that's very popular and focuses on sight words and is for use with this population. In our research, students received the sight word program or they received the Early Literacy Skills Builder, and they all received story-based lessons.
Linda: What was the outcome of this first year?
Diane: What we found in our first year of research that included 23 students was that those 23 students all made gainshad larger post-test scores and pre-test scoresin what we call the conventions of reading. This was exciting, and reflects the effects of the shared stories or the story-based lessons. And we expected that because both groups got the story-based lessons. But of course we can't make much of a causal inference about an intervention when everyone is making gains so that's why we chose randomized trials for half of the students: half of the students received a sight word approach and half of the students received Early Literacy Skills Builder. What was very exciting to us is that the half that received the Early Literacy Skills Builder, had higher post-test scores, significantly higher post-test scores as well as strong effect size for four different measures.
Linda: What were those measures?
Diane: We created two measures that we felt were important for students to show what they know. We had a Nonverbal Assessment of Literacy that is comparable to assessments like the DIBELS, but all the skills have been translated for nonverbal responding since many of our students are nonverbal. That's a test in which we saw strong post-test gains on the section that was on phonics and phonemic awareness. The students in the Early Literacy Skills Builder had stronger skills. We also had just a pre-test/post-test for the curriculum itself, which tested the objectives in the curriculum. That outcome is probably no surprise; the students in the curriculum had higher outcome scores. What's also exciting is that on two standardized measures of languageThe Woodcock Language Proficiency Language Battery and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Testthere were significant differences. There were also significant differences between the groups. We are quite encouraged by these outcomes.
Linda: And speech-language pathologists will be very encouraged by this difference in language skill too.
Diane: We are now replicating that randomized trial study over a four-year period. Each year additional students are added into the study. For Early Literacy Skills Builder to be evidence-based practice, we will need to have more participants in our studies and have more replications, but we are encouraged by our initial outcome and believe that it's because we've based the curriculum on the science of reading. We just refer to the National Reading Panel's synthesis report because it is such a rich synthesis of many, many studies on reading.
Linda: How are you conducting this research?
Diane: Some experimental research is conducted in laboratory settings by researchers conducting the research, or it might be conducted in schools but the researchers are conducting experimental sessions, perhaps in special context. However, it may be helpful for folks to know that all of our research is being conducted in real classrooms in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System (in North Carolina) thanks to the wonderful cooperation of the school system. And it's being conducted by teachers. The way our randomized trial works is that students are assigned to "treatment," so a teacher might be teaching both the experimental curriculum, which is the Early Literacy Skills Builder, and the control curriculum. These teachers have learned to teach two different curricula: one that had been adopted by the school system and one that's used by many school systems across the country, and then this new experimental curriculum. It's been exciting to see how teachers have implemented them.
So again, this research is being conducted with teachers who have been giving us feedback and in real school settings. We began with a development year in which the teachers helped us to try out ideas and then we put it all together into this package called the Early Literacy Skills Builder and that became the intervention in a randomized trial study. But even that study, even with all of our care to make sure that we had as few confounding variables as possible, it's been with the wonderful teacher cooperation to make that work that has made it work.
Linda: I am excited to hear more about the curriculum, Diane. We will pick up on that topic in our next interview. Meanwhile, interested readers can review an article describing the evidence base of Early Literacy Skills Builder at www.attainmentcompany.com/
In addition, the first year data will be reported in an upcoming issue of Exceptional Children but can also be viewed at the Attainment Company website at the address above. Preliminary 2nd year data is also available. My next interview with Diane will give you a glimpse of this exciting currciulum. Stay tuned...