Three faculty members and one affiliate faculty from the College of Education & Human Development’s Department of Learning Sciences have received 2022 seed grants from Georgia State University’s Center for Research on the Challenges of Acquiring Language and Literacy (RCALL) to implement language and literacy intervention programs.
RCALL awards this funding to faculty members “whose research topics directly relate to the study of language acquisition and literacy,” according to the RCALL website.
Assistant Professors Daniel Conine and Sarah Hansen received $35,000 for a project entitled, “A Telehealth Caregiver Training Model to Establish Pivotal Pre-Linguistic Communication Skills in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).”
This project will offer a virtual caregiver training intervention to address some of the socioeconomic and geographic barriers inherent in traditional intervention methods and give caregivers the tools they need to help children with ASD gain valuable early language skills.
“We will be teaching parents of newly diagnosed children with autism how to work on early language and communication skills directly with their own children using evidence-based intervention practices,” Conine said. “Using video conferencing, we’ll provide real-time coaching over the Internet while participating parents are at home with their children.”
Elizabeth Tighe, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and assistant director of the college’s Adult Literacy Research Center, and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Stevens received $42,000 for a project entitled, “Development of the Mighty Morphin’ Word Explorers Intervention for Struggling Adult Readers.”
They will develop and test a seven-week, face-to-face intervention program aimed at improving struggling adult readers’ decoding, vocabulary, morphological knowledge and reading comprehension skills.
“This intervention will use an approach with adult-appropriate reading passages to enhance students’ understanding of the spelling, structure and meaning of words,” Tighe said. “This grant will allow us to develop the intervention materials, test the intervention with struggling adult readers and build and test an app for supplemental practice. With this initial data, we hope to find funding to scale up this work and test the intervention with larger groups of struggling adult readers.”
For more information about RCALL, visit https://researchlanglit.gsu.edu.