It’s after 3:00 p.m. at UT Elementary School, and kids are excitedly running around the play yard letting off steam from a busy day as they wait for their parents. But a few kids troop into the library in pairs, happy to drop off their backpacks, grab a quick snack, and meet with their tutors for 20 minutes. They are part of a new spelling research study underway at the school in partnership with The University of Texas at Austin Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk.
As an elementary school teacher in a South Memphis turnaround school, Dr. Emma Shanahan, the study’s principal investigator, had students in her fifth-grade class who had fallen behind and given their age, should have been in the seventh grade. The students struggled to identify letters and lacked foundational literacy skills. Shanahan discovered there weren’t a lot of programs to address those needs for students in the upper elementary grades, especially when it came words with multiple syllables or irregular words that don’t follow typical phoneme-grapheme relationships.
“When I came to UT Austin’s Meadow Center as a postdoc, I was really interested in seeing how spelling could be a vehicle to improve reading for these older grade school students. We know it works for younger students, but it hasn’t really been tried yet for older kids,” explained Shanahan.
“I appreciate the working relationship between UT Elementary and the University of Texas. I think that is really important to the success of the project, and I appreciate the school’s willingness to collaborate and accept the research team as guests in the school.”
Dr. Emma Shanahan, Meadows Center
Dr. Sharon Vaughn, executive director of the Meadows Center suggested that Shanahan partner with UT Elementary School for the pilot randomized control trial study. As a partner in the research project, UT Elementary teachers and administrators helped Shanahan identify students who needed additional help with their literacy skills. A control group and the group to receive the intervention were identified.
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday after school for a total of 20 sessions, UT Elementary fourth and fifth graders who need additional literacy instruction meet with tutors in the school library. The tutors are former teachers who miss being in the classroom. Through structured spelling activities, the teachers introduce new words to students, including information about the irregular parts of the word. They help students learn to pronounce the words and provide information around the meaning and use of the word. The students have their own notebooks where they write down the words, which helps them take ownership of the words. Other activities include using cards with letters on them to build words, word memorization exercises, and a writing race where students work together to earn points.
Although the project is still underway and no final data has been analyzed, there is already one positive outcome: the students seem eager to come to the library each day and work with their tutor.
Shanahan explained, “I think one of the great things about tutoring is that in regular classrooms even the most attentive teachers, like those at UT Elementary, can’t give every single kid one-on-one conversation time. The kids are excited just to have that opportunity to connect with an adult one-on-one. So, I’m excited to see those relationships become stronger.”
