Current Projects

Overview

Dyslexia Screening Questionnaire (DysQ) Project*

The goal of this project is to create a bilingual screening questionnaire to identify 6-year-olds at-risk for dyslexia. We intend for this measure to be used in pediatrician's offices at the 6-year-old wellness visit that all children have to increase access to this assessment. This project will increase the amount of children who are identified as at-risk as having dyslexia, and in turn give them access to helpful resources from their schools or from speech services if warranted to help them to be successful in school! We are running participants for this project and have availability to schedule your child today! For more information about requirements for participation in this project please click this link to access our flyer or email us using the information on our contact page!

EMBRACE Project

The goal of this project is to increase reading comprehension in both Latino children and their parents using the EMBRACE iPad or online intervention. This interactive intervention app provides families with short stories to read with their child in English and in Spanish, and provides guidance throughout for parents describing what kinds of questions they should be asking their kids during reading to increase comprehension. We hope to be recruiting families for this intervention soon, and will update our site with flyers to register when we begin!

Reading Comprehension in Monolingual and Bilingual Children (MBRC) Project*

The purpose of this project is to bring together multidisciplinary researchers to address poor reading comprehension. In collaboration with Arizona State University preschool and kindergarten predictors of poor reading comprehension were identified in 6th graders to enable identification of the most at risk children even before they learn to read. This study analyzes early predictors of reading comprehension after students have learned to read fluently. It also tests the controversial proposal that some children are late-emerging
‘poor comprehenders’ with reading comprehension deficits appearing in 6th grade despite no prior evidence of problems. We also hope to determine whether results of these studies differ for children who entered preschool speaking English or speaking primarily Spanish. We are currently not recruiting for this project. Please feel free to reach out for more information about this project. 

BSF Project

For this project, we are working in coordination with the US Israel Binational Science Foundation to investigate models of Bilingual teaching for preschool aged children. We facilitate this by collection and analysis of language samples in both English and Hebrew to determine the efficacy of instructional methods. We are currently conducting transcription and analyses for this project, and not currently recruiting. Please feel free to reach out for more information about this project.

EYEPlay* 

What began with a simple idea has become over a decade-long exploration of what it means to teach drama for preschoolers: What is the clearest way to transfer drama facilitation skills to teachers? How can drama support language learning? How can drama support emergent bilingualism? How do you measure effective drama facilitation? How do you measure children’s learning and social/emotional development when they participate in drama-based lessons? We hope you will take some time to look at our research page and continue this learning with us.

The program design today is a direct result of the active participation of hundreds of classroom teachers, teaching artists, researchers and, of course, children. To date, it has been implemented in 122 classrooms, including 24 bilingual/dual language classrooms in Arizona and Florida.

* Project in coordination with Arizona State University