Dr. Shannon Hall-Mills, an assistant professor in the School of Communication Science and Disorders, recently published an article in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Her article, “A Comparison of the Prevalence Rates of Language Impairment Before and After Response-to-Intervention Implementation” presents secondary data analysis of language impairment (LI) prevalence rates of children in public schools before and after a statewide mandate for response-to-intervention (RTI) implementation.

To do this, Dr. Hall-Mills compared statewide and district-level LI prevalence rates across 10 school years. She found that a majority of the 67 Florida school districts experienced an increase in LI prevalence within 1 year following RTI implementation.  However, the degree and direction of change in prevalence rates varied across some of the school districts. Importantly, the data revealed that while there were initial changes in LI prevalence at the same time as the onset of RTI implementation, the numbers of students identified with LI did not continue to grow significantly in the years following the first year of RTI implementation. This finding suggests the initial change could have been associated with the timing of RTI implementation.

Dr. Hall-Mills’s research focuses on written language development and disorders in school-age children and adolescents. She aims to improve the accuracy of assessment and the effectiveness of intervention practices for language and literacy in schools. She is also interested in the effects of educational policy on practice patterns for speech-language pathologists and outcomes for children with speech-language impairment. She teaches graduate courses at CCI designed to prepare future speech-language pathologists to work with children with language disorders.