Locating longitudinal study participants 10 years after last contact: Contemporary approaches to sample retention.

AIMS: Despite their advantages, longitudinal studies often face high rates of attrition. This study documents the extensive efforts associated with retaining a longitudinal cohort last contacted 10 years earlier. METHOD: We examine the processes and outcomes of attempts to reach 1736 individuals who have been part of a multiwave study about growing up in Ontario, Canada. Contact methods include email, phone, text, social media, postal mail, announcements in newspapers, subway stations, and music streaming services. RESULTS: Challenges included a lack of consistent annual communication with participants, children moving out of the parental home, and changes in email addresses and phone numbers. The most effective contact method was phone; text messages and friend referrals were the least effective. Overall, 41.5% of the original sample was reached. Locating former research participants years later necessitated multiple and repeated contact attempts, and intensive human resources. CONCLUSION: Ten lessons for effective sample retention are discussed. In summary, reducing attrition depends on a comprehensive study design and an organized and flexible protocol that adapts to a study's ever-changing needs.

Children's understanding of Aesop's fables: relations to reading comprehension and theory of mind.

Two studies examined children's developing understanding of Aesop's fables in relation to reading comprehension and to theory of mind. Study 1 included 172 children from Junior Kindergarten through Grade 6 in a school-wide examination of the relation between reading comprehension skills and understanding of Aesop's fables told orally. Study 2 examined the relation between theory of mind and fables understanding among 186 Junior (4-year-old) and Senior (5-year-old) Kindergarten children. Study 1 results showed a developmental progression in fables understanding with children's responses becoming increasingly decontextualized as they were able to extract the life lesson. After general vocabulary, passage comprehension predicted fables understanding. Study 2 results showed a relation between young children's theory of mind development and their understanding of fables. After general vocabulary, second-order theory of mind predicted children's fables understanding. Findings point to the importance of developing mental state awareness in children's ability to judge characters' intentions and to understand the deeper message embedded in fables.

Improving Preschool Educators' Interactive Shared Book Reading: Effects of Coaching in Professional Development.

PURPOSE: The objective of this study was to examine the effects of coaching by speech-language pathologists on educators' interactive shared book reading, children's participation in shared reading, and children's language development. METHOD: Thirty-two educators and small groups of preschoolers were randomly assigned to experimental and comparison groups. The experimental group (n = 15) received 4 in-service workshops plus 5 individualized coaching sessions. The comparison group received only the 4 workshops. Participants were video-recorded during a shared book reading activity with a small group of children at pretest and posttest. The video recordings were transcribed and coded to yield measures of conversations, educators' questions, and children's responses. The mean length of utterances of the children's responses was also calculated. RESULTS: There were no significant Time × Group interaction effects for the number and length of shared reading conversations or for the number of participants in these conversations. However, significant Time × Group interactions were observed for the use of educators' experiential reasoning questions, children's experiential reasoning responses, and the mean length of utterances of children's responses. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that coaching increases educators' use of inferential questions, enhancing an interactive shared-reading strategy that had a direct impact on the children's quality and complexity of language.

Oral narratives in monolingual and bilingual preschoolers with SLI.

BACKGROUND: The body of literature on narratives of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) is growing. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of bilingual preschool children with SLI and their patterns of growth. AIMS: To determine the similarities and differences in narrative abilities between preschoolers with and without SLI who are either monolingual or bilingual at two time points. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Forty children completed a narrative retell task in English at two test points. The mean ages were 52 and 58 months at Times 1 and 2, respectively. We examined performance on measures of narrative macrostructure (narrative information) and microstructure (sentence length, number of different words, verb accuracy, first mentions) in monolingual and bilingual children with and without SLI. The bilingual children were from diverse first-language backgrounds and all spoke English most of the time. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: A series of repeated-measures analyses of variance was used with language ability (typical development or SLI) and bilingual status (monolingual versus bilingual) as the between-subjects factors and time (Times 1 or 2) as the within-subjects factor. Results indicated a significant main effect of time for four measures (i.e., Information Score, lexical diversity, sentence length and verb accuracy). The between-subjects analyses indicated a significant difference between the typically developing children and the children with SLI in all measures and a significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children for verb accuracy only. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: This study showed that all four groups of children showed growth over a 6-month period and that bilingual children exposed predominantly to English in the home performed similarly to their monolingual peers in measures of narrative information, sentence length, number of different words and first mentions.

Effects of coaching on educators' and preschoolers' use of references to print and phonological awareness during a small-group craft/writing activity.

PURPOSE: The current study investigated the effects of coaching as part of an emergent literacy professional development program to increase early childhood educators' use of verbal references to print and phonological awareness during interactions with children. METHOD: Thirty-one educators and 4 children from each of their classrooms (N = 121) were randomly assigned to an experimental group (21 hr of in-service workshops plus 5 coaching sessions) and a comparison group (workshops alone). The in-service workshops included instruction on how to talk about print and phonological awareness during a post-story craft/writing activity. All educators were video-recorded during a 15-min craft/writing activity with a small group of preschoolers at pretest and posttest. All videotapes were transcribed and coded for verbal references to print and phonological awareness by the educators and children. RESULTS: Although at posttest, there were no significant group differences in the educators' or the children's references to print as measured by rate per minute, both the educators and the children in the experimental group used a significantly higher rate per minute of references to phonological awareness relative to the comparison group. CONCLUSION: Professional development that included coaching with a speech-language pathologist enabled educators and children to engage in more phonological awareness talk during this activity.

Effects of coaching on educators' vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an emergent literacy professional development program enhanced educators' use of vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading with small groups of pre-schoolers. METHOD: Thirty-two pre-school educators and small groups of pre-schoolers from their classrooms were randomly assigned to experimental or comparison groups. The 15 educators in the experimental group received four in-service workshops as well as five individualized classroom coaching sessions. The comparison group received only the workshops. Each educator was video-recorded reading a storybook to a small group of pre-schoolers at pre-test and post-test. The videos were transcribed and coded to yield measures of the vocabulary-teaching strategies and children's vocabulary-related talk. RESULT: The findings revealed that the children in the experimental group engaged in significantly more vocabulary-related talk relative to the comparison group. A non-significant trend in the data indicated that educators in the experimental group used more vocabulary-teaching strategies at post-test. The educators' familiarity with children's authors and book titles at pre-test was a significant predictor of their outcomes. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that an emergent literacy professional development program that includes coaching can enhance children's participation in vocabulary-related conversations with their educators.