Marcia Barnes

The Principal Investigator (PI) will conduct a program of research for improving reading and spelling outcomes for adolescents with word-level reading difficulties or disabilities (WLRD) while participating in mentoring and training activities to develop expertise in iterative intervention development, models of word reading and spelling, and the development and dissemination of products with education stakeholders. Many adolescents, including those with learning disabilities, have significa...

A large direct contributor to comprehension problems in middle school students with or at risk for reading disabilities is pervasive difficulty in making inferences necessary for understanding what is read. Because literacy attainments in middle school are highly predictive of postsecondary success, middle school provides a later developmental window within which to intervene for struggling adolescent readers. Consequently, a technology-based inference-making intervention, Connect-IT-Compute...

This project will develop an intervention to address a significant problem for students with word-level reading disability (WLRD; i.e., specific learning disability in basic reading, dyslexia): reading words and text with automaticity. There is evidence that (a) poor reading fluency is a consistent and persistent characteristic of WLRD across written languages, and (b) word- or text-reading fluency skills are particularly resistant to intervention. The intervention will address previously un...

The goal of this project is to replicate the efficacy of an intensive Tier 2 math intervention, Pre-K Mathematics Tutorial (PKMT), for pre-k children at risk for mathematics difficulties, and compare the relative effectiveness of two delivery models (Pull-Out vs. In-Class) for implementing the intervention. Math difficulties occur early in childhood and are associated with negative long-term outcomes. PKMT is designed to address these difficulties by providing intensive instruction on a core...