OSU campus

New intervention to help beginning readers exit special education

Emily Rodgers Emily Rodgers

 

Beginning readers who are labeled learning disabled, along with their special education teachers, will help researchers at The Ohio State University ensure that children learn to read and leave special education behind.

The project will create an intervention to benefit thousands of children between the ages of 6 and 9 who have been placed in special education for literacy instruction. In the past, these children tended to remain there throughout their schooling, with the achievement gap between them and their peers widening over the years.

 

 

By the time these struggling readers reach middle school, they have grown more and more discouraged. As a result, they are more likely to be retained, to develop emotional problems and to drop out of high school.

The new intervention, to be created by the College of Education and Human Ecology, will shine a light on the best approach to get children reading and much better prepared for life.

Aiming at a seemingly intractable problem

“Improving Literacy Outcomes for Beginning Readers with Disabilities” will be conducted with a three-year, $2.998 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education under the Investing in Innovation (I3) program. Matching dollars from private partners will elevate funding to $3.7 million total for the three years.

“Our researchers’ approach is a novel one, aimed at a seemingly intractable problem,” said Cheryl Achterberg, dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology. “By using a rigorous development and testing process, we expect the new intervention to be substantially more effective than current practices. The children, schools and society at large will benefit.”

Emily Rodgers, associate professor of teaching and learning and principal investigator of the project, spent nine years on the front line as a classroom and special education teacher early in her career. She knows firsthand how children with disabilities struggle when learning to read.

“After decades of reading disabilities research, we are still not much further ahead in knowing how and what to teach young students who are placed in special education settings for their reading instruction, so that they can catch up to their peers,” she said. “We are confident though that expert teaching can make a difference for many of these students.”

Ohio State will lead the four-state project working with three partner universities: Clemson in South Carolina, Emporia State in Kansas and Georgia State. Each university will recruit local school districts to take part.

"Our innovative project will take ingredients shown by research to help children struggling to read and combine them to meet children’s individual needs," said Jerome D’Agostino, professor of quantitative research as well as co-principal investigator. “Using an experimental design, we will test the intensity and content of instruction to identify which features work best in concert to improve students’ achievement.”

Lessons will emphasize 5 critical skills

D'Agostino and Rodgers will work with experienced literacy coaches at the partner universities to develop the lessons for the children. Based on strong literacy theory, the lessons will emphasize five skills critical to beginning readers:

  • Identify letters
  • Understand phonemics (the sounds of letters and speech)
  • Recognize words
  • Gain fluency in reading
  • Decode the meaning of text

The team will also create content for two graduate courses. The coaches will teach the courses, preparing 136 special education teachers to deliver the lessons to the children. Detailed data will be collected to determine what improves students’ achievement to the point that they can move to the regular classroom.

A rigorous external evaluation will be conducted of the project by Michigan State University to document the quality of the intervention.

D'Agostino and Rodgers are currently director and co-director, respectively, of a $45 million, five-year i3 Scale-Up grant that has expanded the use of the Reading Recovery intervention in more than 30 states.

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