In October, OAR’s Board of Directors authorized funding for six new applied autism research studies in 2018. These new grants, totaling $176,090, bring OAR’s total research funding to over $3.6 million since 2002. This is the fifth of six previews to be featured in The OARacle this year.
Research suggests that many preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate early signs of reading. Studies also show that the rate of improving their reading skills is significantly lower than that of students with learning disabilities. Specifically, children with ASD have difficulty with meaning-focused skills, those that encompass skills such as vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. In fact, roughly only 15 percent of children with ASD score within the expected range for meaning-focused skills.
Veronica P. Fleury, Ph.D., an assistant professor of special education at Florida State University, is conducting a two-year OAR-funded pilot study, “Students and Teachers Actively Reading Together.” She plans to develop and evaluate an adaptive shared reading intervention for preschool children with ASD that aims to help them develop meaning-focused skills to support reading readiness. Her goal is to test how well the intervention works for educators and if the outcomes are beneficial to the children they teach.
A total of 50 children with ASD between the ages of 4 and 5 (25 children per academic year) will be recruited from public and private schools in Tallahassee, Fla., to participate in the 24-week shared reading intervention.
Dr. Fleury’s project will use adaptive interventions, which are common in clinical, but not educational, settings to provide decision-making guidelines to determine the types of interventions needed for each student.
The first-stage intervention, dialogic reading, is an instructional method of shared reading, in which an adult reads aloud to children. In dialogic reading, the adult uses specific question prompts to encourage children to converse with the adult reader about the story. It has been found to have positive effects on meaning-focused skills, specifically in the area of vocabulary and general oral language development for preschool children, including some with language delays.
After either four or eight weeks, researchers will assess children’s knowledge of target vocabulary from books that were encountered during the first weeks of the intervention. Children who are either “high performers” or “fast developers” will continue with the group dialogic reading intervention. All other children (i.e., “slow to respond”) will be randomized to one of two intensified instruction conditions.
Teachers will use two adaptive interventions that intensify instruction for children who are considered “slow responders”:
A member of the research team will assess children’s knowledge of book vocabulary prior to the study (pre-test), at the four-or eight-week decision point, and at the end of the study period (post-test).
Participating teachers will learn the methods used in the intervention in a full-day workshop at the beginning of each academic year. A half-day workshop will be conducted immediately after week four (for early-decision classrooms) and week eight (for late-decision classrooms) to cover instructional intensification strategies. A member of the research team will meet with teachers weekly to provide performance feedback and ongoing coaching. Videos made by the teachers will be used to evaluate the extent to which teachers implement intervention procedures as intended. Teachers will also fill out a survey to provide feedback on their experiences delivering the intervention.
Experts have stressed the importance of including language and early literacy instruction as part of early intervention programming for children who are at risk for reading difficulties, but our understanding of literacy skill development for children with ASD remains under-addressed in research and practice. Dr. Fleury hopes that her intervention, which can be tailored to fit children’s needs, can improve reading skills and provide educators with an adaptive classroom tool. Because the intervention is tailored for use in public schools, she hopes that, if found to be effective, it can be used to reach many children with ASD across socio-economic lines.
The proposed study would be a valuable contribution to the autism community, offering outcomes and recommendations that could positively impact individuals with ASD, influence the services provided by educational professionals, and guide researchers interested in school-based literacy interventions. Taking steps to remediate—and perhaps prevent—reading difficulties for children with ASD should be an educational priority given the ubiquitous influence of reading on both academic success and overall quality of life.
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