Setting
The study took place in one day care center in Tallahassee, Florida.
Study sample
The day care center served primarily minority and low socioeconomic status (SES) families. The
children in the study were aged 3–5 years, from a minority racial group, and mostly from low SES
families. The 36 children were randomly assigned to either the intervention group—read-aloud with
structured language interaction (10 children)—or one of three comparison groups: read-aloud with
no interaction (9 children); interaction with no read-aloud (9 children); and no contact (8 children).
Intervention Group
The read-aloud with structured language interaction condition involved the study author reading
a preselected book with a small group of children, using verbal and nonverbal interactions before,
during, and after the reading that focused on the book, story, and children’s related experiences.
The author met with the intervention group on a daily basis for 10 weeks to deliver the intervention.
Comparison Group
There were three comparison conditions. The read-aloud with no interaction condition involved
the author reading to a small group of children using the same books as in the intervention
condition with no interaction initiated by the author. The interaction-only condition involved
no read-aloud activities; the author engaged a small group of children in art activities, providing
comments and discussing the activities. The author met with each of these comparison
groups on a daily basis for 10 weeks. The third comparison group condition was business-asusual
classroom instruction, in which children had no contact with the author. The businessas-usual
general classroom instruction condition was excluded from this intervention report because contrasts against this group do not meet WWC standards.
Outcome descriptions
In the comprehension domain, the author used the PPVT-R, which measures receptive vocabulary.
In the alphabetics domain, the author used the Concepts About Print Test (Clay, 1979),
which measures knowledge about book orientation, print convention, concepts of words
and punctuation, and relationship between print and meaning. In the language development
domain, the author used the Record of Oral Language (Clay et al., 1983), in which children
repeat carefully constructed sentences. For a more detailed description of these outcome
measures, see Appendix B.
Support for implementation
The author implemented the intervention and two of the comparison conditions. No support or
training was provided.