From the National Center for Education Research (NCER)

Reading and Writing Education Research Awards Announced

NCER has awarded four 5-year grants for research that will contribute to improving students' reading and writing.

• Patterns of Early Reading Development and Teacher and Program Correlates for English Learners. Anne Hafner at California State University, Los Angeles, is using growth modeling to identify how long it takes English learners to become proficient at reading, to compare English learners' growth with that of native English speakers, and to identify teacher, teaching and programmatic conditions that are related to gains in reading development in English learners.
• Vocabulary Curriculum for Kindergartners and First-graders. Dennis Ciancio of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston is developing an empirically based vocabulary curriculum and evaluating the role of vocabulary instruction in the development of language arts proficiencies in young students. The project will also examine how professional development, teacher knowledge, and quality teaching moderate relations between curriculum implementation and literacy outcomes.
• Postsecondary Content-Area Reading-Writing Intervention. Dolores Perin of Teachers' College, Columbia University is developing and determining the potential effectiveness of an intervention to help adult struggling readers comprehend and write about science text. The intervention to be developed is a curricular supplement that provides guided practice in reading comprehension and writing skills using text from science textbooks of the type that students will encounter in later course work.
• Vocabulary Development Through Writing. Judith Scott of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is developing and obtaining evidence of the potential effectiveness of a vocabulary intervention for improving the reading and writing achievement of 4th graders. The intervention will be implemented in the context of a unit of study/writing workshop model of teaching writing and will focus on word study/word consciousness development.