Marcia Barnes

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...

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...

The purpose of this study is to design and test a technology-based intervention aimed at improving how middle school students with reading disabilities make inferences while reading. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that students with disabilities continue to perform at the basic level with little change in comparison to their typically developing peers in the past few administrations of this assessment. There is preliminary evidence that improvements in ...

Mathematical knowledge at school entry is an important predictor of later academic achievement. Children who are especially low performing on measures of mathematical knowledge at the beginning of preschool often show less growth in mathematical knowledge over the preschool year, remain well below school readiness benchmarks for mathematics, and continue to struggle in mathematics in later grades despite receiving high-quality classroom instruction. These students require more intensive int...