Goldstein story friends research behind.pdf

The Research Instruction with and without Other Modifications.

Two book series totaling 26 books offer children interactive instruction for one book per week.

Behind Story

10–15 minutes per day. This is sufficient to provide children with many opportunities to learn vocabulary and comprehension skills that will help prepare them for later academic success. Howard Goldstein Elizabeth Spencer Kelley

Program Foundation

Children enter early childhood programs with diverse early language and literacy experiences. A substantial number of children, especially those growing up in low-income homes, have limited oral language skills that place them at risk for later reading disabilities. For example, Qi, Kaiser, Milan, and Hancock (2006) reported that preschoolers enrolled in Head Start scored an average of approximately 1.5 standard deviations below the normative mean on a standardized measure of receptive vocabulary, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997). Preschool children with limited oral language skills, including vocabulary, teaching preschoolers and some kindergartners are at risk for reading disabilities in later school years (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). Thus, there is a need for curricula that enhance the language skills of children who demonstrate weaknesses in language development.

Response to intervention (RTI) offers a framework for preventing language and reading disorders. Often called multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), the RTI or MTSS approach is a multitiered instructional framework that seeks to provide high-quality instruction to students with a range of needs and to monitor children’s learning progress (Greenwood et al., 2012). MTSS seeks to promptly identify children who are falling behind their peers developmentally and then to provide them with instruction that is sufficient for them to catch up. Applications of tiered intervention models, particularly in the area of reading instruction, have been shown to be more effective than traditional approaches (e.g., O’Connor, Harty, & Fulmer, 2005).

Research Behind Story Friends

Within the broad domain of oral language, we identified two primary areas for intervention: vocabulary and comprehension. Our first presumption was that teaching vocabulary and comprehension could be accomplished in the context of a commonly accepted preschool activity: storybook reading. Based on substantial evidence that instruction embedded in storybooks could be effective in teaching oral language skills to children (Coyne et al., 2004; Ezell & Justice, 2005; Whitehurst et al., 1994; Ziolkowski & Goldstein, 2008), we designed the Story Friends approach as a Tier 2 intervention for children demonstrating delays in oral language development.

The Story Friends curriculum consists of a total of 26 storybooks (two sets of 13). Each child has a book because the books have interactive activities, such as flaps that children lift to reveal answers to questions. Typically, groups of three children listen simultaneously to each automated storybook three times per week, with each lesson lasting approximately 10–15 minutes.

The books are organized into units of three stories, where children listen to three books and then a fourth book reviews the previously taught vocabulary. Children learn two new challenging academic words and one or more basic concept words per story and have opportunities to practice these newly learned words at the end of each book.

Pedagogical Approach

Story Friends is an evidence-based early language curriculum that specifically targets vocabulary development; basic concepts; and comprehension skills, promoting language and literacy in preschool children. The design of Story Friends was based on the premise that early childhood teachers need a curriculum that does not require extensive time for training, preparation, or implementation. Therefore, the curriculum delivers content through an automated format using prerecorded audio files of the story text and embedded instruction. This reduces the planning burden for teachers and can be implemented with high fidelity in early childhood education settings.

Given that vocabulary development is implicated in later reading fluency and comprehension, longitudinal studies are needed to determine long-term effects on later reading development. The curriculum has been refined through multiple studies to ensure that intervention effects are replicated in authentic classroom contexts.

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