The University’s College of Education recently received two grants totaling nearly $9 million to study methods on improving student behavior and reading skills.
The grants, awarded by the U.S. Department of Education, will fund two research centers within the College of Education to develop methods to help children from kindergarten to third grade who have difficulty reading or who exhibit behaviors that may become future discipline problems.
“These grants speak to the extraordinary breadth and depth of the faculty and students at the College of Education,” said Martin Kaufman, dean of the College of Education. “These centers are making cutting-edge research available to those in the teaching profession so they can implement best practices in the classroom.”
The U.S. Department of Education only awards six research grants in this area, and the University was the only institution to receive more than one, Kaufman said.
Robert Horner, professor of special education and one of the administrators of the grants, said the two awards are “collaborative grants” because they fund research on schools’ two most important tasks: teaching students how to get along with other students and teaching students how to read.
The reading grant will create the Center for Improving Reading Competence Using Intensive Treatments Schoolwide program, which will help identify beginning readers who are not developing reading skills at the same level as their peers, said Deborah Simmons, associate professor of education and an administrator of the grant. Under the department of education’s Institute for the Development of Educational Achievement, CIRCUITS will work with students from 12 schools in three states to develop strategies for reading intervention programs. The grant will also monitor the progress of these strategies.
Research shows that struggling readers may make up to 20 percent of an individual classroom, Simmons said. Reading skills are enormously important because the United States is based on text-heavy information technology, she said.
“Students today are not poorer readers than they were years ago — the demands are higher,” she said. “The literacy bar has been raised.”
In fact, she said, U.S. grade schools develop curriculum as if every student knows how to read by the end of the third grade. In education jargon, it is said that students between the grades of kindergarten and grade three “learn to read”; after third grade, students “read to learn.”
However, teaching appropriate behavior is a more complex task, Horner said. While schools assume that students have learned to read by the end of the third grade, “We don’t have something as clean as that with school behavior,” he said.
The basis of behavior programs is to proactively teach every student behavior rules, Horner said. For example, each student is taught basic rules, such as taking turns and being respectful to others. School faculty, staff and administrators explain the rules beginning on the first day of school, reward students for good behavior and punish them for poor behavior.
The behavior grant will create the Center for Schoolwide Behavior. Under the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior, the new center will work with 90 schools from five states to track changes in behaviors, academic performance and effect on families.
Students react positively to schoolwide approaches, Horner said, because everyone understands the same non-negotiable rules.
“The students are taught how to behave correctly, not just how not to behave badly,” Horner said. “All the kids in the school know what is expected of them.”
Members of the College of Education have been promoting schoolwide behavior for the past ten years, often to great results, Horner said. In one middle school, the most common type of office referrals dropped 50 percent in the first year after a schoolwide behavior program was instituted.
“Kids like organized schools,” Horner said. “They are not happy with chaotic, random environments.”