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School of R.O.C.K Receives Grant
Submitted: 08/03/09
The School of R.O.C.K. (Reading and Organization for Cool Kids), a three week summer reading camp for children with reading challenges, has been awarded a grant in the amount of $17,950 from The Community Foundation of Shreveport-Bossier. The grant will fund the reading camp at LSU Shreveport during June 2010 and will ensure that the LSUS-Caddo Parish partnership continues.
"This will vastly increase the size and scope of the program," said Dr. Kevin Jones, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at LSUS, who co-authored the grant proposal with colleague Dr. Kevin Krug. "An appropriate level of funding was needed to improve our capacity to attract more graduate and undergraduate students to serve as intervention specialists, thus increasing the number of participating children and the range of services provided."
This year's School of R.O.C.K. provided three hours of daily instruction in reading and self-management skills to 13 second-grade children selected by Caddo Parish School Board's Reading First Coordinator. Intervention specialists were six psychology majors and three advanced graduate students in the School Psychology Program. The schedule featured five classroom "stations," each addressing a specific target of reading instruction such as phonemic awareness or text comprehension. All stations combine both research and practice by providing evidence-based academic interventions while carefully observing, for each child, the impact of added components that have not yet been tested in prior studies. Thus, the program provides high-quality literacy instruction for children and research experience for LSUS students.
The program held its inaugural commencement ceremony on June 26, 2009, with each child receiving an M.R. (master of reading) degree. An evaluation report submitted to Caddo Parish indicated that participating children's reading skills improved an average of one-half grade level during the three weeks.
"Classroom teachers rarely have the luxury of working this closely with individual children," explained Dr. Kevin Jones, "or the means to evaluate small increments of learning." According to his research, however, both elements are needed to close achievement gaps.