Martha “Marty” Hougen, a longtime MCPER principal investigator and researcher, has been awarded the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) Margaret Byrd Rawson Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes IDA members “whose work on behalf of IDA embodies Margaret Rawson’s compassion, leadership, commitment to excellence, [and] fervent advocacy for people with dyslexia, and whose work is nationally recognized as furthering the mission of IDA,” according to the IDA website.

Hougen was a key member of MCPER for many years. Most recently, she led the College and Career Readiness Initiative: English/Language Arts Faculty Collaborative. She also worked with the CEEDAR Center at the University of Florida and, before that, was a teacher and school administrator. Currently, she is “a national consultant collaborating with state leadership and institutions of higher education to improve educator preparation in the implementation of the science of reading and instruction” and serves on the board of the Center for Effective Reading Instruction, according to an IDA announcement.

Christy Murray—a longtime MCPER researcher, principal investigator, and project director—has been named the center’s communications director.

In the new role, Murray will oversee product development strategy and events that translate research to practice and will lead the dissemination of education research findings to a diverse group of stakeholders.

“I’m looking forward to working with our MCPER researchers to disseminate important research findings in a way that really resonates with educators and others, who can then use that information to improve practice in schools and classrooms,” Murray said. “I think this will further elevate MCPER’s reputation as the ‘go-to’ place for guidance on research- and evidence-based practices.”

Murray first joined MCPER in 2002 after serving as an elementary classroom teacher in the Austin area. She has served as PI, co-PI, or director of numerous educational research and technical assistance projects at the federal and local levels. From 2005 to 2012, Murray served as the deputy director of the Center on Instruction’s Special Education and Response to Intervention Strand. During this time, she provided technical assistance to regional comprehensive centers and state departments of education, as well as developed products, publications, and professional development materials. Murray then served as the PI and project director of Middle School Matters, an education reform initiative founded by the George W. Bush Institute and implemented at MCPER. Over the past several years, she has developed a social media presence for MCPER and contributed to the redesign of MCPER’s website.

Please join us in congratulating Christy!

MCPER, in partnership with the University of California, Riverside, has been awarded $3.8 million to launch a 5-year project to evaluate a reading comprehension intervention for middle grade students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The project, Reading Enhancements for Students With Autism Spectrum Disorders (Project READ), will be led by UC Riverside’s Michael Solis and MCPER’s Sharon Vaughn and Colleen Reutebuch. The funding is through the National Center for Special Education Research. 

The intervention has demonstrated promise for meeting the reading comprehension needs of fourth- to eighth-grade students with ASD. Improving reading comprehension is critical for increasing these students’ later opportunities to attend college and obtain meaningful employment. Higher levels of reading comprehension are associated with greater gains in other academic areas, higher levels of employment, increased independence, and overall improved quality of life. 

The research team will evaluate the efficacy of the intervention using a randomized controlled trial conducted across three cohorts in middle schools in California and Texas and will examine follow-up effects 3 months after the intervention is complete. The team will also collect data on the costs to implement the intervention and its cost effectiveness. 

The intervention addresses vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension. It consists of 50 one-on-one tutoring sessions delivered daily for 30 minutes across 10–12 weeks. Difficulty builds across lessons, first focusing on word-level meaning, then sentence-level comprehension, and finally multiparagraph passage comprehension. Materials include texts with multiple readability levels to meet individualized student needs within a standard protocol.

Participants will include 180 students in grades 4–8 (ages 9–14) with ASD and low reading comprehension. Each student will be matched in a pair and then randomly assigned to a treatment condition that will receive the intervention or a comparison condition that will receive services as usual in their schools. 

Districts and local school campuses interested in participating should contact Project Director Colleen Reutebuch.

The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk (MCPER) is looking for a postdoctoral scholar to participate on research teams developing and validating intensive interventions as part of multitiered systems of support (MTSS).

This paid position begins in August 2023. Members of traditionally underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. Send a letter of interest and curriculum vita to Dawn Stanco.

This project is part of a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The aim of this 5-year grant is to prepare a cohort of highly qualified fellows to conduct research in special education, educational psychology, and other disciplines; understand how to interpret the findings and implications of this research; and prepare educators in how to intensify academic and behavioral interventions. The program will cover education sciences research related to academic outcomes for individuals with disabilities, methodology and statistics, and the policies and pragmatics of research in educational settings.

MCPER Executive Director Sharon Vaughn, principal investigator of this project, and key investigators Greg Roberts, Nathan Clemens, Sarah Powell, Chris Doabler, and Elizabeth Swanson will collaboratively lead the project and serve as mentors. Together, they bring years of experience and expertise on quantitative methods, research design, assessment and effective intervention, quantitative methodology in program evaluation, data management and analysis, and modern measurement theory.

MCPER researchers and experts in speech-language pathology from Utah State University recently published their investigation of a storytelling program for at-risk children in grades 1–4, finding that it improved the students’ oral language, written language, and reading skills.

Utah State’s Sandi Gillam and Ron Gillam, and MCPER’s Sharon Vaughn, Greg Roberts, Phil Capin, and Anna-Mari Fall, conducted the multiyear, randomized controlled trial to evaluate the Supporting Knowledge of Language and Literacy (SKILL) intervention. Sandi and Ron Gillam developed SKILL. The study, funded by a $3 million grant from the National Institute on Educational Research, was recently published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

After screening 3,380 children from 138 classrooms in 14 schools in Northern Utah and Central Texas, the researchers randomly assigned 357 students who were at risk for language and literacy difficulties to receive the SKILL treatment or to a control group. SKILL was provided to small groups of two to four students in 36 lessons of 30 minutes each across a 3-month period.

Statistical analyses revealed that students who received the SKILL treatment significantly outperformed students in the control group on multiple tests of oral narrative comprehension and production immediately after treatment. Oral narrative production for the SKILL group remained significantly more advanced at follow-up testing 5 months later.

The study also found that improvements in oral storytelling for children who received the SKILL intervention generalized to a measure of writing immediately after intervention ended, and the treatment advantage was maintained at follow-up testing 5 months later. Further, the third- and fourth-graders who received the SKILL intervention significantly outperformed children in the control group on a standardized measure of reading comprehension.

The positive effects of the SKILL intervention for oral and written language were observed for monolingual and bilingual children, as well as for children who were and were not identified as needing special education services. The severity of children’s language, writing, and reading difficulties did not prohibit them from profiting from the relatively short intervention. The researchers found that children who received the intervention, regardless of severity, demonstrated measurable improvements in their oral and written language and reading skills.

Parents also noticed the positive effects of the SKILL curriculum. The mother of Clara, a child who participated in SKILL, said, “I watched my daughter’s reading and test scores improve, both within the program and in her regular classwork. Perhaps most importantly, as her skills grew, she grew to love reading more and more. Clara’s test scores have continued to improve in school, and my family and I attribute participation in the SKILL program as a crucial turning point for her. She is now in seventh grade and says that her favorite subjects are writing and science. As a mom, there is nothing more rewarding than watching your child gain the confidence you always knew they had inside. We just needed the right thing to bring it out.”

Clara added, “My favorite thing about [SKILL was] finally feeling like I got a chance. It helped me to know I could do hard things.”

To learn more about SKILL, visit the program’s website or contact Sandi Gillam.

It is our pleasure to welcome our 2009 Meadows Fellow, Dr. Nicole Block. Block joins MCPER from a joint doctoral program at Claremont Graduate University and San Diego State University in California, where she attained her Ph.D. in education with a concentration in special education. Her dissertation is entitled A Study of a Response to Intervention Model for Urban Sixth-Grade: Analyzing Reading, Language, and Learning Differences in Tier 1 and Tier 2.

The 2009 College of Education National Rankings, recently released by U.S. News and World Report, lists UT Austin’s College of Education as third in the nation among public colleges and schools of education and seventh in the nation overall, tied with Johns Hopkins, Northwestern University, University of California-Berkley and University of Wisconsin-Madison. MCPER and its partner centers, the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts and the Texas Child Study Center, are acknowledged as “nationally and internationally acclaimed programs and research that fuel the college’s continuing success” in a press release from the College of Education.

Colleen Reutebuch, Michael Solis, and Leticia Martinez attended the Word Generation professional development at Harvard University in June. A modified version of Word Generation will be part of the CREATE research study to take place in the Austin Independent School District.

Jin Ok successfully defended his dissertation on August 4, 2009. Ok is a graduate of the Special Education Department of UT’s College of Education. He has been at MCPER for 6 years, working on the Higher Education Collaborative project, which is part of the Texas Reading First Initiative. Please join us in wishing him well as he heads to a new job in Korea and his next adventure.

Sharon Vaughn, executive director of MCPER, was selected as the Special Education Department Dean’s Fellow for the 2009–2010 academic year. She will serve as the Fellow during the spring 2010 semester. MCPER extends its heartiest congratulations to her!