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COPYRIGHT 2001 International Reading Association Inc.
THE INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION'S OUTSTANDING DISSERTATION AWARD, which has been given yearly since 1964, recognizes exceptional contributions made by doctoral students in reading or related fields. Candidates may be self-nominated or nominated by their dissertation advisors. Each submits a monograph based on the dissertation, which must have been completed during the previous academic year. These monographs undergo rigorous review by the Association's Subcommittee on the Outstanding Dissertation Award. The winner and other finalists are recognized at IRA's Annual Convention in April or May. The award also carries with it a monetary prize made possible by a donation from Silver Burdett & Ginn, Inc., a U.S. educational publishing house.
In 2001, three dissertations received this honor from among the finalists. The following summaries of the 2001 award-winning dissertations have been provided for RRQ by their authors.
Children who do not respond to early literacy instruction: A longitudinal study across kindergarten and first grade
Stephanie Al Otaiba
George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Researchers and educators have expressed concern about children who do not benefit from effective and well-implemented early literacy interventions (e.g., Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2001; Blachman, 1997; Torgesen, 2000). The purpose of this abstract is to summarize a study that tracked children's responsiveness to treatment (Al Otaiba, 2000). This 2-year perspective permitted identification of child characteristics that correlated with treatment responsiveness over time. Identifying these characteristics could improve screening measures and selection of children for early and intensive intervention.
Participants were selected from a larger study of 312 students (Fuchs et al., in press). Children were in one of four groups: (a) treatment in kindergarten and first grade, (b) treatment only in kindergarten, (c) treatment only in first grade, and (d) a no-treatment comparison group. Kindergarten treatment included either Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (K-PALS) (Fuchs e: al., 2001) and teacher-directed phonological awareness activities selected from Ladders to Literacy (O'Connor, Notari Syverson, & Vadasy, 1998), or Ladders alone. First-grade treatment was First-Grade PALS.
At kindergarten, unresponsiveness to treatment was defined as performance in the lowest 30th percentile of growth on two phonological measures: segmentation and letter-sound naming. Treatment responsieness, by contrast, was defined as performing at or above the treatment mean. At first grade, unresponsiveness was defined as reading 40 words per minute or less (Good, Simmons, & Smith, 1999); responsiveness was defined as reading at or above the treatment mean. A total of 104 students were selected from the larger study and fit one of three student responsiveness categories: never, sometimes, or always responsive. Seven students received special education services for speech and language. There were no statistically significant differences between never, sometimes, or always responsive students in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, or Title I participation.
Because little is known about student characteristics associated with unresponsiveness, I selected a relatively large number of measures used in prior related research. These measures included phonological retrieval (rapid letter-naming), encoding of phonological information with (sentence imitation) and without syntactic information (word sequence), phonological discrimination (word discrimination), general verbal ability as measured on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R), syntactic knowledge (grammatical closure), and attention and conduct (measured by the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment). Fidelity of treatment information was collected frequently to evaluate whether unresponsiveness to treatment was related to poor...
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