SCSD Faculty Receive Grants from Council on Research and Creativity

Posted by Stephanie Vivirito on

Four faculty members of Florida State University School of Communication Science and Disorders (SCSD) received grants from the Council on Research and Creativity (CRC) at FSU. A major faculty committee appointed by FSU’s Vice President for Research, the CRC awarded Christopher Constantino, Kelly Farquharson, Elizabeth Madden, and Sana Tibi with awards from their Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) and Multidisciplinary Support (MDS) programs.

Chris Constantino HeadshotChristopher Constantino

Proposal title: Stuttering and Quality of Life: Exploring the Disability Paradox

Grant amount, program: $14,000, COFRS Program

This project will use measures of actual quality of life and assumed quality of life to document the effects of stuttering on quality of life and to quantify the prejudice that exists towards stuttering. “This grant will help the Seminole Stuttering lab to continue to investigate how we can move beyond seeing as a pathology but instead as an integral part of people’s identities,” Constantino said.

Kelly - headshotKelly Farquharson

Proposal title: Using the experience sampling method to examine dosage of speech sound treatment in school-based service delivery

Grant amount, program: $13,000, COFRS Program

Co-Investigator: Christopher Constantino

“This grant is providing funding for a project in which we are examining dosage and related factors surrounding provision of school-based therapy to children for speech sound disorders,” Farquharson said. “We are looking to recruit 200 speech language pathologists (SLPs) and currently have 110 SLPs who have finished the study. This project is innovative as we are using a phone application to have the SLPs track data from their therapy sessions over the course of one week. In the current study, we are looking at things like therapy session duration and frequency as well as dosage within the session. Participants are also providing detailed demographic information regarding their caseload size and years of experience. Our long-term goal for this work is to better understand “what works for whom” when it comes to speech therapy in school-based settings. We are working towards clinically-relevant and valid recommendations so that therapy dosage can be prescriptive to the individual needs of each child.”

elizabeth madden headshotElizabeth Madden

Proposal title: Client and Clinician Perspectives on Reading and Writing after Stroke and Aphasia

Grant amount: $14,000, COFRS Program

“Receiving the CRC COFRS award will allow me to conduct qualitative research with stroke survivors and speech-language pathologists to better understand how stroke and aphasia (an acquired language disorder) impact reading and writing abilities,” said Madden. “This work is important to me because it will highlight the insider perspectives of individuals living with aphasia and speech-language pathologists who work with them in therapy. The findings from this work will help inform a reading and spelling treatment I am developing for individuals with aphasia to help improve literacy skills after stroke.”

sana tibi headshotSana Tibi

Proposal title: Literacy outcomes for Syrian refugee children in Jordan: Understanding child, school, and family factors

Grant amount: $24,960

Co-Investigator: Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski, FSU College of Education

This project aims to examine the literacy learning of Syrian children in Jordanian schools in a holistic manner, including an investigation of the engagement of schools and parents in children’s learning. First, researchers will collect baseline data on Arabic early literacy outcomes among Jordanian and Syrian first graders in split-shift schools, with the goal of providing evidence on gaps between the two groups. Then they’ll interview school administrators, teachers, and parents about children’s literacy learning, Syrian children’s social integration in schools, and how relationships between schools and families affect children’s literacy learning.

“The opportunity of the MDS grant through CRC will afford me the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Stephanie Zuilkowski who has an expertise in education and early childhood development in developing countries,” said Tibi. “My research focus on Arabic literacy combined with Dr. Zuilkowski’s expertise in educational access in low-resource context will be an excellent multidisciplinary opportunity for research. Our research will be informed by our respective fields of study as well as the broader set of disciplinary frameworks that contribute to the study of literacy in crisis settings.”

The COFRS program provides up to $14,000 of summer salary support to assist with research or creative endeavors that encourage outside funding. A typical budget might include faculty salary, student assistant stipend, research-related travel, and supplies. The MDS program supports the initial formation of multidisciplinary FSU alliances planning research or creative activity. The proposal must describe how the initial joint efforts will result in new program of research or creative activity that will lead to external funding, as well as how FSU will benefit from the establishment of these new multidisciplinary research and creative projects. This program provides up to $25,000 per project.