The Clinical Core, which provided services to Projects I, II, III, and IV, accomplished all its specific aims during the initial funding cycle. For the next funding cycle, it proposes five specific aims.
Specific Aim 1 is to continue to ascertain families for Project III, with probands in grades 1 to 9. The goal is to ascertain 50 probands with dyslexia (reading and spelling disability) and 50 probands with dysgraphia (only spelling disability) in each project. Year and test the probands, their nuclear family members, and extended family members (N=500 families and approximately 2500 family members over the next five years).
Specific Aim 2 is to modify the phenotyping batter to include only the best measures from the first four years, to reduce the time required to administered it from 4 to 2 hours, and to add measures of morphological processing to use in ongoing aggregation, segregation, and linkage studies.
Specific Aim 3 is to triage qualified probands in Project III to the joint treatment/brain imaging studies of Projects I and IV.
Specific Aim 4 is to conduct cross-sectional studies of Morphological Awareness and Motivation during the first 3 years and of Math Processes and motivation during the last 2 years in an unreferred sample of students in 4th through 9th grade. Results for the first three years will be used to evaluate the construct validity for morphological awareness relative to phonological, orthographic, and rapid naming processes for reading and spelling in normally developing students, to generate means and standard deviations for grade to use in computing z-scores for morphological measures in the phenotyping battery, to study math measures in a future phenotyping battery, and to study the normal development of motivation for reading and writing as a reference point for related study of motivation in students with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia.
Specific Aim 5 is to provide outreach services in the form of (1) a summer intervention program for probands in Project III who do not qualify for or choose not to participate in the joint treatment/brain imaging studies of Projects I and IV, (2) a mentoring program for teachers to learn effective instructional strategies for working with student with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia, and (3) workshops for teachers, administrators, and psychologists to disseminate the research results generated across the projects of the UWLDC and to reduce research findings to practice.
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