Our Research

Kindergarten Intervention in Summer School

Principal Investigators

All investigators are faculty members in the Children’s Learning Institute.

Principal Investigator:
Carolyn Denton, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science Center Houston

Co-Principal Investigators:
Jason Anthony, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science Center Houston
Dennis Ciancio, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science Center Houston
Steven Hecht, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science Center Houston
Emily Solari, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science Center Houston

Funding Agency

Internally Funded

Description of the Project

The purpose of this project is to develop and evaluate a comprehensive 4-week summer school curriculum for kindergarten students who are at-risk for difficulties in reading and/or mathematics. The curriculum will include research-validated intervention procedures in beginning reading, reading comprehension, vocabulary development, and mathematics. This study will be a pilot of the summer school intervention, and the results may provide a basis for future larger-scale studies of the intervention.

Procedures

We are writing fully-developed lesson plans for each day of summer school. We plan to train regular summer school teachers and paraprofessionals to implement the curriculum and to provide substantial coaching support to these teachers during the implementation.

Each participating school will have 2 to 4 kindergarten summer school classrooms. Schools will identify students for summer school using their regular procedures, and then students will be randomly assigned within each school to receive the newly-developed summer school curriculum or their normal summer school curriculum. We will compare children’s progress on measures of early reading, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and mathematics understanding and problem solving.

Participants

Participants will be about 160 kindergarten students and about 5 teachers and 5 paraprofessionals (instructional teachers’ aides).

Sites

To be determined

Timeline

January-August, 2008

Project Staff

Keith Millner, Project Coordinator

For More Information

Keith Millner, Project Coordinator
713-500-3727
Keith.Millner@uth.tmc.edu