Read It Again! In Early Childhood Special Education

The purpose of this project was to examine the efficacy of an intervention called Read It Again! for children with disabilities enrolled in early childhood special education and their typically developing classmates over the academic year and during kindergarten. Many children in early childhood special education programs exhibit disabilities that place them at high risk for future reading difficulties, including primary speech-language impairment or a general developmental delay in which language skills are impaired concomitantly with one or more other developmental domains, typically cognition. Children with primary speech-language impairment or a general developmental delay typically show significant lags in the attainment of important early literacy skills during the preschool years, exhibit significantly poorer kindergarten readiness compared to their peers, and are susceptible to exhibiting a reading disability in the later primary grades. In the last decade, numerous intervention studies have focused on improving the language and literacy skills of young children. However, very few of these interventions emphasize teachers' use of differentiated instructional strategies, which are essential for such interventions to be used effectively in early childhood special education classrooms. Furthermore, very few available language and literacy interventions have been rigorously examined for their relevance to children with disabilities. This project intended to examine the efficacy of one such intervention for this population.