As part of a larger group of researchers at The Florida State University, Dr. Kenn Apel and Dr. Shurita Thomas-Tate of the School of Communication Science & Disorders are co-investigators on the “Reading for Understanding Research Network” project. The five-year, $100 million grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to Florida State and five other research teams. Florida State’s researchers will receive $26 million. The purpose of the project, which includes over 130 investigators, is to assert a major attack against the problem of poor reading comprehension in students by developing working solutions for children.
“Students in the U.S. are not performing as well as we would like them to on national measures of reading or writing,” Apel said. “If we can find better ways of instructing our students, not only will students benefit by being better readers and writers, but society will benefit as students are better prepared to meet the academic, social, and vocational demands they face.”
By using a network approach, the IES hopes to speed up the educational research process. Researchers will collaborate closely with one another to rapidly develop and test new approaches and interventions in multiple content areas and grades.
Apel and Thomas-Tate join a team at the Florida Center for Reading Research. Together, they are investigating whether, and how, specific interventions improve the reading comprehension skills of children, particularly those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in grades kindergarten through fifth grade. The center is jointly administered at Florida State University by the Learning Systems Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Thomas-Tate will be working with Dr. Carol Connor (Education), one of the principal investigators on the grant along with Dr. Christopher Lonigan (Psychology). Apel will be working with Dr. Stephanie Al Otaiba (Special Education) and Dr. Young-Suk Kim (Education).
The focus of Apel’s work is examining how the reading comprehension of students might be boosted by making them more linguistically aware — able to connect how language forms the foundation for reading and writing.
“I have a long history of interest and research into the linguistic underpinnings of literacy, so my role on the grant dovetails wonderfully with my research interests,” Apel added. “And it also allows me to collaborate with colleagues and friends, whose research and expertise I greatly admire, with whom I might not have worked otherwise.”