The goals of the proposed research in Project 1 are (a) to extend the scope of the University of Washington Learning Disabilities Center from research on intervention for component writing disabilities to research on intervention for component reading disabilities as well; and (b) to validate treatment protocols by showing their effectiveness in preventing or remediating disabilities in specific component reading skills in grades 1 to 4. This research is important because it will help prevent the mental health problems associated with chronic learning problems related to specific reading disabilities, which often arise in early childhood. Prevention studies will be conducted in years 2-5 of the project. Short-term Intervention Studies will be conducted in each year of the 5-year project. A long-term treatment study for children with severe reading problems will continue throughout the project to show that severely reading disabled children can be brought up to grade level with intensive systematic and individualized theory-based intervention. Both prevention and short-term intervention studies will compare the relative effectiveness of teaching (a) work recognition based on single orthographic-phonological correspondences (whole written - whole spoken word, letter-phoneme, and letter cluster-syllable/rime) and different combinations of these single approaches; (b) print-sound mapping with or without segmentation training; (c) question answering and summarization in comprehension training; and (d) word recognition and comprehension alone and in combination. Results of all studies will be evaluated using state-of-the-art multi-level techniques (at the individual and group level) and growth curve analysis.
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