Early Achievements - Shaping Early Language and Literacy Skills

Summary

Language skills are important for long-term reading comprehension success. Yet there are limited instructional approaches available for prekindergarten (pre-K) teachers to use in their inclusive classrooms to boost literacy-related language skills in children with and without language delays or disorders.

In the first part of this study, the investigators will develop a teacher training program focused on building pre-K children's language-based literacy skills. Teachers will be trained and will use the strategies that they learn during literacy-related activities in their inclusive pre-K classrooms. Their students' language-related literacy skills will be measured before and after their training. Based on teacher feedback and child assessment information, the training program will be revised. In the final part of the study, a preliminary randomized control trial (RCT) will be done using the revised training approach. The results of the RCT will help the investigators know if the teacher training program helps to improve the effectiveness of teachers' instruction and their students' development of language-related literacy skills.

The primary goal of this research study is to determine whether study-trained pre-K teachers in inclusive early childhood education classrooms use more effective teaching strategies than teachers who do not receive the training. A secondary goal of this research study is to determine if this teacher training program strengthens language-related literacy skills for students with and without language disorders or delays. The research team hypothesizes that teachers who participate in the training program will use effective teaching strategies more often than teachers who do not receive the training. Additionally, the investigators predict that teachers who receive the training will feel more confident teaching early language-based literacy skills to their students (with and without language delays/disorders) than teachers who do not receive the training. Researchers also predict that students taught by teachers who receive the training will perform better on language tests when compared to their peers in classrooms where the teacher training program was not used.

Conditions

• Developmental Language Disorder

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Early Achievements - Shaping Early Language and Literacy Skills

EA-SHELLS is a professional development program that includes a 6-hour workshop and about 14 in-person coaching sessions using Practice-Based Coaching. Teachers will implement the EA-SHELLS instructional approach in their classrooms during whole-group book sharing activities to target vocabulary, syntax, story grammar, and listening comprehension. Teachers will also lead story retelling activities using pictures cards and 3D props to further target all four skills. Teachers will be provided with commercially available children's books augmented with supplemental text to explicitly define vocabulary and cue teachers' elicitation of children's verbal engagement for targeted vocabulary, syntactically elaborated sentences, and story grammar elements. Instructional strategies include naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention and language facilitating (e.g., focused stimulation) strategies. Teachers will read each provided book about four times over one to two weeks.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Institute of Education Sciences

  collaborator FED

• Hugo W. Moser Research Institute at Kennedy Krieger, Inc.

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Rebecca Landa, PhD · Hugo W. Moser Research Institute at Kennedy Krieger Institute

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

45 Months

Max Age

65 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-08-26

Primary Completion

2026-09-30

Completion

2026-10-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations