Drs.
Howard Goldstein and Robyn Ziolkowski in the Department of Human Development and Family Science have been awarded a 5-year cooperative agreement by the Institute of Educational Sciences National Center for Special Education Research to establish a center to conduct research and provide national leadership on implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) for young children in the areas of early literacy and language.
Along with a team of collaborators at the University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota, the Dynamic Measurement Group in Oregon, as well as The Ohio State University, we will be developing new progress monitoring measures to identify children who are not succeeding in the general pre-kindergarten curriculum and new intervention strategies that provide these children with increased opportunities to acquire the skills needed to enter school ready to read.
We will be developing a tiered-approach to instruction that will target skills in four areas:
- Vocabulary,
- Phonological awareness,
- Print awareness and alphabet knowledge, and
- Comprehension.
The Ohio State University site will have primary responsibility for designing and evaluating supplemental instructional materials that will be engaging and highly independent activities for preschoolers and will require minimal assistance from paraprofessionals to implement.
We expect that at the conclusion of this 5-year scope of work, we will have developed the essential components that community programs need to develop response-to-intervention models addressing early literacy.
