TeacherRead: Supporting New York City PreK Teachers in Their Shared Book Reading Practice

• In Event: Shared Book Reading: Book Qualities, Interventions, and Teacher Behaviors that Shape Effectiveness

Abstract

Shared book reading is a common activity in PreK classrooms, which—when highly interactive—supports children’s skill development in three areas predictive of later reading achievement: oral language, print knowledge, and phonological awareness. TeacherRead was developed to support PreK teachers in their shared book reading practice. The design of the TeacherRead intervention draws on a growing body of research on language and literacy instruction for pre-K children. It uses instructional approaches that research has shown to be most effective for teaching these skills: (a) code-oriented instruction focused on children’s phonological awareness and print knowledge, (b) oral language instruction targeting vocabulary and sentence structure, and (c) shared book reading emphasizing oral language skills (NRC, 2008; NELP, 2008). Further, the TeacherRead intervention uses replicable instructional targets from dialogic reading combined with those from phonological awareness training and print knowledge training.
TeacherRead was implemented in close partnership with New York City’s PreK for All program in a randomized control trial (RCT) to assess its impacts. The study team hypothesized that those children assigned to the TeacherRead intervention would perform better on measures of oral language, phonological awareness, and print knowledge than their peers who were not exposed to the intervention. This trial, which will produce its first full set of impact estimates in winter 2023, included 132 PreK for All classrooms and 725 children. The study was implemented across two cohorts in the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years. (The COVID-19 pandemic explains the two-year gap between these cohorts.)
The TeacherRead study was conducted in 81 PreK for All sites in New York City, 66 percent of which were community-based organizations, 17 percent were pre-K centers, 14 percent were district schools, and 3 percent were charter schools. Most children in the study were either Hispanic (44 percent) or Black (22 percent). Teachers who implemented TeacherRead were predominantly White (39 percent), Black (22 percent), or Hispanic (16 percent).
To assess children’s oral language, phonological awareness, and print knowledge skills, we administered one-on-one in-person assessments with children in the sample using the following widely used assessment tools: Preschool Early Literacy Indicators (PELI; Dynamic Measurement Group, 2015); Test of Preschool Early Literacy—(TOPEL) Print Knowledge and Phonological Awareness subtests (Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 2007); and, Woodcock-Johnson III Letter-Word Identification and Picture Vocabulary (WJ-3; Woodcock, McGrew & Mather, 2001). A preliminary analysis of one outcome measure, the Preschool Early Literacy Indicators (PELI) found positive impacts for children (ES=0.12) in Cohort 1 (2018-19). We have not yet analyzed these data for the 2021-22 cohort but will include all these outcomes in our presentation.
Depending on whether the early impact estimates hold up we will either discuss how the TeacherRead model, as implemented in New York City, could be adapted to other settings, or discuss why the model fell short of expectations. We will also discuss our implementation experiences, which exceeded our expectations, especially in the second cohort, shortly after schools and programs reopened for in-person instruction following the pandemic.

Authors

• Johannes Bos
  Presenting Author

• Aleksandra Holod, American Institutes for Research