MCPER Executive Director Sharon Vaughn appointed to statewide Reading Advisory Committee
October 18, 2019

MCPER Executive Director Sharon Vaughn has been selected to serve on the newly formed statewide Reading Advisory Committee. 

The committee is one of five established through Texas House Bills 3 and 3906. The other commitees are Special Education, Compensatory Education, Financial Aid, and Assessment. The experts on the Reading Committee will advise the Texas Education Agency on its plans to support reading education. 

In addition to Vaughn, Jack Fletcher—director of the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities, which is jointly based at MCPER and the University of Houston—was selected to serve on the committee. For more information and a list of the other committee members, read the Texas Education Agency announcement. 

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

New report examines best practices for identifying specific learning disabilities
January 30, 2019

The Texas Center for Learning Disabilities has published a new report that summarizes the research base for popular methods for the identification of specific learning disabilities and makes recommendations for practice. 

The Identification of Specific Learning Disabilities: A Summary of Research on Best Practices—authored by Principal Investigators Jack Fletcher and Jeremy Miciak, both of the University of Houston—begins with a summary of the legal requirements for specific learning disability identification and the necessary components and features of a comprehensive evaluation for special education. It then discusses the attributes of specific learning disabilities according to different conceptual frameworks and reviews research on the reliability and validity of different methods for identification. The report concludes with recommendations for best practice.

The Texas Center for Learning Disabilities is a partnership between the University of Houston, The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Center research leads to a more comprehensive classification of learning disabilities, a more integrated understanding of intervention for children with reading problems, and important cross-discipline insights into the nature of learning disabilities. Currently, this research takes the form of four projects to be conducted over the next five years.

For more information and to download the report, visit the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities website.

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

Texas Center for Learning Disabilities shifts focus to adolescents struggling to read
October 5, 2017

Reading experts have effective strategies to help many of the youngest children who struggle to read, but that work has been less effective with older students. Those whose first language isn’t English are especially difficult to teach.

The Texas Center for Learning Disabilities, a multidisciplinary research center led by the University of Houston (UH) that includes The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk (MCPER), will tackle the issue with an $8.4 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The competitively awarded federal grant is the third for the center since it was established in 2006 to address learning disabilities from a variety of disciplines. Jack Fletcher, chair of the UH Psychology Department and principal investigator for the grant, and some of his collaborators have spent the past 25 years addressing learning disabilities involving reading and math.

The center, which includes researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and MCPER at The University of Texas at Austin, is overseen by the UH Department of Psychology and the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics, led by UH psychology professor David Francis.

Francis has long worked on issues involving minority-language speakers, known as English learners. He will work on this project along with professors Elena Grigorenko and Arturo Hernandez, associate professor Paul Cirino, and research assistant professors Jeremy Miciak and Pat Taylor, all with the UH Department of Psychology; associate professor Jenifer Juranek of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; and Executive Director Sharon Vaughn, Assistant Director Greg Roberts, and assistant professor of psychology Jessica Church-Lang, all with MCPER.

The center has led some of the key breakthroughs in understanding learning disabilities, including the following:

• A fundamental shift in how a disability is identified, making diagnostic decisions only after intervention rather than simply because a student’s achievement test score is lower than the score on an intelligence test would predict
• Evidence that early intervention can dramatically reduce the number of students who struggle to read
• Demonstration that learning to read prompts new neural networks in the brain

The work is the result of “team science,” Fletcher said, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the classification, early intervention, and remediation of learning disabilities. It includes the use of brain imaging, in addition to work in public school classrooms in Houston and Austin.

Grigorenko’s work spans both developmental psychology and molecular genetics. Her arrival at UH in 2015 added a genetic component to the center’s work, allowing it to delve more deeply into the epigenetic response to intervention and to address the central question the center seeks to answer: Why do some children pick up reading easily and others struggle? And when children struggle, what can help them succeed?

Working with older students is a natural evolution, Fletcher said, because researchers have established effective interventions for the early grades, although not all schools use them. Middle schoolers who are English learners often have trouble reading even when their spoken command of English is good, he said.

But it’s unclear how a variety of factors—economic disadvantage, language proficiency, and learning disabilities—interact to cause the problem.

Students in the project—English learners who meet school benchmarks for English proficiency—will receive intervention to improve reading skills, and researchers will collect information through brain imaging and genetic and cognitive testing.

“This is real team science,” Fletcher said. “Lots of people from different disciplines are working together to bring science to education.”

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

Eunsoo Cho, MCPER colleagues win Samuel A. Kirk Award for journal’s best research article of 2015
February 25, 2016

Eunsoo Cho, a postdoctoral fellow in MCPER's Reading Institute, has been honored as the lead author of a prestigious journal's best research article of 2015.

"Cognitive Attributes, Attention, and Self-Efficacy of Adequate and Inadequate Responders in a Fourth-Grade Reading Intervention" won the Samuel A. Kirk Award for 2015, which recognizes the best research article in the journal Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. Cho's co-authors included MCPER researchers Garrett Roberts and Philip Capin, Associate Director Greg Roberts, Executive Director Sharon Vaughn, and Jeremy Miciak of the University of Houston.

For a description and full citation of the article, visit the MCPER Library. For more information or to obtain the article, visit the journal's website.

MCPER's Sarah Powell won the Kirk Award in the practice category.

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

Texas Center for Learning Disabilities is now on Facebook
July 8, 2013

The Texas Center for Learning Disabilities (TCLD) is now on Facebook. Follow updates from TCLD by "liking" it on Facebook.

Visit the TCLD Facebook page.

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

Del Valle Independent School District nominates MCPER for Distinguished Partnership Award
June 18, 2013

MCPER has been nominated for the Del Valle Independent School District Distinguished Partnership Award in recognition of the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities' work in the district. MCPER's Michael Solis, John McKenna, and Jessica Kelly attended an awards banquet on May 28 to receive a plaque and be recognized for the nomination. Joyce Bannerot, principal of Popham Elementary School, officially nominated the project.

For more information on the project, visit the TCLD external website.

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities 

Kristina Metz successfully defends dissertation, sets sights on internship
June 12, 2013

MCPER congratulates Kristina Metz, a researcher with the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities and Middle School Matters Institute, for successfully defending her dissertation: "The Role of Family Functioning, Family Messages, and Child Cognitions in the Development and Maintenance of Depression." Metz next will begin a psychology internship at La Rabida Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which specializes in treating children with chronic illnesses, with developmental disabilities, or who have been abused.

Metz, a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Psychology with a concentration in school psychology, earned her bachelor of arts degree in child development at Vanderbilt University. She went on to conduct research on early intervention programs at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. Her research interests include school-based early intervention programs, family-school connections, and international education development.

Tags: Reading Institute  Texas Center for Learning Disabilities