Shayne Piasta

The purpose of this study is to examine associations between children's language gains in preschool and reading outcomes in elementary school and to identify malleable classroom factors that are associated with children's language gains. Children's early language development is important for their school readiness and later reading success. Researchers will use secondary data and collect primary data to identify and examine policies and classroom processes and practices to determine malleabl...

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of the Nemours BrightStart! program for prekindergarten children who need additional support in order to enter kindergarten with emergent literacy skills similar to their peers. While practitioners and researchers recognize early childhood as a key period of literacy development, many students who enter kindergarten do not demonstrate the literacy skills necessary to learn to read and write. Research shows that the reading achievement gap i...

The Children's Learning Research Collaborative (CLRC) trained four postdoctoral fellows in research related to the designing and testing of interventions intended to strengthen the language and literacy skills of children.

This project will evaluate the Ohio Department of Education-sponsored professional development course for early childhood educators known as the Literacy Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Educators ("Core") program. Nearly 1,200 Ohio pre-K educators have been trained in Core since 2008; however; the effectiveness of this program and its companion mentoring program, the Teacher Leader Program, to increase educators' literacy-related knowledge and practices has not been tested against other ...

The primary purpose of this project is to increase fundamental understanding of the role of lower and higher level language skills in listening and reading comprehension, and develop effective classroom-based approaches to increase language, general knowledge, and comprehension skills in prekindergarten through grade three. Researchers will begin by conducting basic studies to identify promising targets for intervention. Interventions will be developed and refined through an iterative proce...