Associate Professor Douglas Petersen, who has helped create new assessments and interventions, works with students at Slade Elementary during a teacher training presentation.
Together with Trina Spencer at Northern Arizona University, Douglas Petersen, UW associate professor in the Division of Communication Disorders, has pioneered groundbreaking assessments and interventions for preschool and school-age children that accurately identify reading and language difficulty, and improve reading comprehension, language, writing and more.
“Language is the foundation for academic success,” Petersen says.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that about 80 percent of Native American, African-American and Latino children read below grade level, he says, noting that around 50 percent of Caucasian children also read below grade level.
The issue is typically not with decoding but with comprehension, Petersen says. “Most of the schools in our country have an assessment and instructional focus on decoding, or being able to read words on a page. However, being able to read something fluently is not the same thing as being able to understand it. My research has been all about investigating ways to efficiently and validly assess reading and language, develop less biased decoding and language dynamic assessments, and to implement multi-tiered systems of language support.
“The intervention we have developed—Story Champs—is based on the cumulative evidence that indicates that when children are asked to listen to complex language embedded in narration and practice producing that complex language, academically relevant language production and comprehension are facilitated.”
His research has resulted in a dynamic assessment of decoding and language—called the Predictive Early Assessment of Reading and Language (PEARL)—and benchmark and progress monitoring tools for decoding and language (the CUBED) that greatly reduce cultural and linguistic biases, predict future reading and language difficulty and inform instruction.
“Our assessments and interventions not only improve oral language comprehension and expression but also greatly improve reading comprehension and writing,” Petersen says.
Through collaboration with UW Associate Professor Roger Steeve and teachers and administrators, Story Champs, the PEARL and the CUBED are being used in Albany County School District #1, as well as school districts across the state, including on the Wind River Indian Reservation. “We started the Story Champs language intervention with the second-graders there,” Petersen says. “Even though the intervention has an oral language focus, second-graders, after just a few months of narrative intervention, produced writing that was stronger and more complex than the fifth-graders in that school. That’s really just the beginning.
“The CUBED assessment, which is free, has been downloaded in every state across this country, and it’s been downloaded in 17 different countries,” Petersen says. “We talk about our research, and it catches on like wildfire because the need is so great.”
A $1.5 million U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences grant is helping Petersen and fellow researchers develop a dual-language preschool version of Story Champs.
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