The goal of Project II is to test the effectiveness with which research and clinical practice in reading and writing can be disseminated to and implemented by classroom teachers. Because research findings generated in the laboratory seldom translate simply and neatly to real world settings, Project II will include not only a dissemination component but also an implementation component. Project II will involve a collaborative partnership between University of Washington faculty researchers, who will provide training and assessment of teacher behavior and student outcomes, and practicing teachers, who will implement the recommended practices and provide feedback to the researchers about the implementation. In each of the 4 academic years covered by the project teachers will participate in a two-week Summer Training Institute in which current research findings related to teaching children with reading and writing disabilities will be disseminated to both regular and special education teachers. The dissemination will include live and videotaped demonstrations of procedures and guided practice in implementing those procedures. The interventions disseminated to the teachers will include interventions from treatment research from (a) other NIH funded groups, (b) groups at the University of Washington (e.g., R01 in Appendix A of Project I and Project I of this application), (c) reports in the literature in the field of learning disabilities, and (d) reports in the literature for instructional practices for normally developing children. Our approach to intervention will emphasize balance (i.e., integration of low-level and high-level skills and the interrelationships among motivational and cognitive variables). We will evaluate the effectiveness of our training by (a) monitoring and enhancing the fidelity of teacher implementation of targeted procedures; and (b) assessing progress of children on targeted skills. Each year we will compare teachers in the Experimental Group (10 regular teachers with less than 5 years experience, 10 regular teachers with more than 5 years experience, and 10 special education teachers) who participated in the summer training institute and the on-going support activities with the Wait-listed Control Group (10 regular teachers with less than 5 years experience, 10 regular teachers with more than 5 years experience, and 10 special education teachers) who do not receive the training initially but will have the option to participate in it the following summer. Teachers will be randomly assigned to Experimental and Control Groups, and the progress of children will be monitored in the Control Group prior to their teacher receiving the special training. Like Project I, Project II will use multi-level hierarchical linear modeling to evaluate growth over time on the target skills at the treatment group level, at the teacher/class level, and at the individual level. Dissemination beyond the project participants from the 1st through the 5th years will be through videotape libraries and edited volumes.
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