Literacy programs

Climbers
Writing sample coding manual

Interim report 2009 (pdf)

Eastern Iowa project
Final report (pdf)

Iowa E-books
Presentations

The CLIMBERS Project: This Department of Education grant investigates the efficacy of the Breakthrough to Literacy intervention program. An initial project, entitled Breakthrough to Literacy in the Muscatine Iowa Schools, evaluated the impact of an implementation of the BTL curriculum in grades kindergarten through second grade. Based on the experiences of the study in Muscatine, Dr. Hurtig applied for and was awarded a $5.9 million Department of Education grant, called the Climbers Project (Chicago Literacy Initiative: Making Better Early Readers). This study is now beginning its fourth year.

The overall purpose of the Climbers study is to provide evidence of the effectiveness of a reading intervention, Breakthrough to Literacy (BTL), taken to scale in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The BTL model is driven by the four best predictors of reading achievement: oral language, oral comprehension, and vocabulary development; alphabet knowledge; phonological/phonemic awareness; and concepts of print. It incorporates professional development and in-classroom support for the teacher; classroom materials, manipulatives, and print materials for children; individualized software instruction; home connection materials; instructional print guides for teachers; and a powerful diagnostic and management software tool for the teacher.

The study focuses on gathering data that will inform the status, progress and future of early literacy initiatives in the third largest school district in the United States. The study uses a randomized cluster design with randomization occurring at the school level. The design calls for two cohorts of students who will begin in pre-kindergarten and receive two years of early literacy intervention. Both classroom observation as well as individual assessments will be used to evaluate student development as well as fidelity of curriculum implementation.

The Iowa E-book Project: Lap reading is an important activity that supports early literacy and language development. This early home literacy experience provides important support for the development of language skills. It is a natural activity that establishes a parent-child interaction and supports vocabulary development through visual scaffolding by way of the graphics embedded in children's books. The narrative nature of text provides the child with a rich set of syntactic and semantic models. The structure of the text and the lap reading setting supports the adult in assisting and facilitating the child's development and ability to respond in a linguistically relevant manner. Lap reading also supports the development of thinking and problem solving skills through collaborative thought processes. Because lap reading generates interest and engagement, the parent-child dyad engages in the requisite practice that is necessary to internalize the thought processes critical to both cognitive development and subsequent educational achievement.

For children who are not given the opportunity to engage in early lap reading, a critical early language and literacy experience is lost. The Iowa E-book project was established to develop a tool to enable lap reading for a range of children with developmental disabilities or hearing loss or for children who might not for a variety of other factors have the opportunity to engage in natural lap reading. The E-book was designed to provide a natural learning environment that supports interactions that provide considerable practice and appropriate feedback in a challenging yet entertaining manner.

The University of Iowa has developed a software tool that will permit parents, teachers and clinicians to create Iowa E-books with sound, video and animation. The tool allows use of both digitized speech/sounds and text to speech in different languages. The program is designed to allow the child to navigate through the E-book in a number of different ways and to make query contingent responses. The tool will operate on any Microsoft Windows XP™ platform. It has been successfully implemented with a wide variety of children. Depending on the child's physical abilities, E-books can be accessed either via direct selection (touch screen or track-ball) or by using a scanning option that can be controlled with a single switch.

We anticipate that the tool will be downloadable from the Psychology of Language Laboratory website in late 2009. Lab personnel are hoping to negotiate with children's book publishers to arrange for adaptation of popular children's books for use as E-books.