Contact: Carol Connor
cconnor@fcrr.org
(850) 228-7006

May 20, 2010

A Florida State University reading expert has received a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study reading comprehension at a critical time in student development: the transition into the last years of elementary school, when the ability to read plays an increasingly important role in learning other subjects.

Carol Connor

Carol Connor, associate professor of psychology, has been awarded $339,000 from the NICHD, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to conduct the study through the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), which is operated jointly by Florida State’s Learning Systems Institute and the College of Arts & Sciences.

“We are studying a really important time, this second/third to fourth/fifth grade transition,” explained Connor. “Students are learning how to read in order to be able to learn, and that’s a difficult shift for children to make. Some children hit a wall: They do fine in earlier grades but then have late-emerging difficulties.”

This is the latest of four interrelated studies by Connor that have followed reading development in students at several North Florida schools since the first grade. Funded by the NICHD and the U.S. Department of Education and totaling more than $7.3 million, the research has yielded substantial evidence that tailoring reading instruction to fit a student’s individual language skills can significantly improve his or her progress.

Connor calls this approach “individualizing student instruction,” or ISI. Assessment and classroom observation data on a student are used to generate a dynamic forecasting intervention (DFI) model – a kind of recipe that suggests the instructional strategies that best fit that child. When done properly, with adequate professional development for teachers, it can make a difference in a student’s ability to read.

Connor has incorporated computer algorithms, based on DFI models, into software that, when given information on a child’s vocabulary, decoding and comprehension skills, prescribes the types and amounts of literacy instruction that will best help the student.  Connor likens this to a meteorologist who, based on past weather data, can reasonably predict the track of a hurricane. But while meteorologists are powerless to change the course of weather history, teachers can fend off an educational disaster-in-the-making with teaching strategies recommended by the model. According to a series of studies, including Connor’s own, children whose teachers implemented the ISI intervention from grades 1 to 3 left the third grade generally reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade level, Connor said. The new grant will be used to develop DFI models for fourth- and fifth-graders.

“When we understand individual child differences, we can do a better job of designing instruction that really works for children -- one size doesn’t fit all, ” said Connor, who has written about these results for the upcoming third edition of the Handbook of Early Literacy Research. “The idea with these DFI models is that we can make them better as we gather more data. We can really start to make a difference in how students are gaining these critical reading skills.”

Connor hopes the newest grant, on which she is collaborating with fellow psychology professors and FCRR researchers Ralph Radach and Christopher Schatschneider, will build on the encouraging findings of the previous projects.

This study will differ, though, from earlier work in that it will examine students not only in language-arts settings, but also as they learn science and social studies. Connor wants to better understand how children at this level apply their literacy skills to learning other subjects.

To measure this, Connor will have students complete specially designed pencil-and-paper tests, as well as monitor students’ reading using a camera that tracks their eye movement as they read text on a computer screen. Among other things, Connor will be looking for whether children, when confronted with confusing text, reread earlier sections of a narrative to clarify it, or simply plow ahead without making that extra effort to comprehend.

“What we’re hoping is that we can understand where comprehension is breaking down,” said Connor, “that by setting up these kinds of tasks, we will be able to pick out the children who are really paying attention, and the children who are just reading the words and not really understanding what the words mean.” 

A student’s struggle to read may be due to lack of attention, a confusing text structure, insufficient background knowledge leading to incorrect inferences, or some other factor. Each possible diagnosis has its own implications for how to help children comprehend better.

Connor said that, because of the many factors at play, this project will be more challenging than the three previous studies: It may turn out to be difficult to draw definitive cause-and-effect conclusions. But if successful, the study’s potential impact is very large: Leaving elementary school with these higher-level reading skills are key to students’ long-term success. “They’re going to do better not just in middle and high school,” said Connor, “but they’re going to do better in life.“