Getting very young, at-risk children on the path to future academic success is the goal of a new Vanderbilt University research study.
Vanderbilt University Peabody College researchers Ann Kaiser, professor of special education, and David Dickinson, professor of education, designed and will conduct the study, which will work with pre-schoolers in the Head Start program in Birmingham, Ala. The study is one of the first interventions that will simultaneously address curriculum, language content and teaching strategy in an attempt to improve language and literacy skills in the highest risk Head Start enrollees.
“Effective early intervention during the preschool years for children at highest risk for school failure may improve their chances of learning to read and to learn from reading in the early elementary school years,” Kaiser, director of the Research Program on Families at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, said. “Bringing together the big three—curriculum, linguistic content and teaching strategy—in a single intervention is the best we can do, both conceptually and practically, in teaching young children.”
Kaiser and Dickinson were awarded a $2.99 million four-year grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the federal of Department of Education, to conduct the study. Four hundred eighty children and 60 teachers will participate.
“We will target those children with special needs and children with the lowest language scores in each of the 40 classrooms randomly assigned to the new intervention,” Dickinson said. “Our intervention will include a curriculum that I helped develop, Opening the World of Learning, and an intensive natural language teaching approach, Enhanced Milieu Teaching, that Ann Kaiser developed and refined over a decade. We will compare the performance of children receiving these interventions with that of children in 20 other randomly assigned classrooms that will continue to receive the current instructional program. Our goal is to identify specific classroom experiences that lead to enhanced language growth.”
“I am thrilled that we are targeting the lowest-skilled kids,” Kaiser said. “These are the kids most at risk. If we can show effects with them, we will have done something really important.”
For more Vanderbilt news, visit VUCast—Vanderbilt’s news network—at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/news.
Media contact: Melanie Moran, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu