The APPRISE Project AppRISE is a fun, universal screener that assesses school readiness and dyslexia risk in children ages 3 to 8.  APPRISE involves the use of a game-based set of assessments delivered through an app. The goal of the project is to provide families and schools with reliable and valid data that will help identify students at serious risk of dyslexia and with difficulty in reading-related areas like executive function.

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To learn more about the APPRISE Project, visit appriseproject.org. We are seeking collaborators in Connecticut for the 2018-2019 school year and across the country for 2019-2020. Send an email through the APPRISE website to get involved!

Project CALI focuses on professional development for co-teachers who provide content-area middle school instruction. The goal is to help these teachers build students’ literacy skills while teaching them important grade-level content. In Project CALI, teachers participate in four cycles of professional development that include teacher learning meetings, instructional planning, coach demonstrations, coach-teacher co-taught lessons, and lesson observations.  In these cycles, teachers learn strategies to introduce students to content-area texts, summarize texts, and work collaboratively to understand concepts. It also includes differentiated student support.

CARING focuses on understanding the connection between instruction and neurological development. Second and third grade students with reading difficulty receive 80 lessons of instruction with the research-validated Empower™ developed by Maureen Lovett and colleagues.

Before instruction, students visit the Brain Imaging Research Center at UConn and complete a neuroimaging scan in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.  Then, they participate in instruction, and students visit Haskins Laboratory for brain scans using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) seven times so we can track neurological response to instruction.

IN/PoWR tests the impact of two very different reading instructional programs on the neurobiological development of students with reading challenges. A Morpheme Reading Intervention focuses on using meaning parts in words to improve reading skills. A Syllable Reading Intervention focuses on breaking words into syllables to read them.

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Students visit the Brain Imaging Research Center at UConn to complete a magnetic resonance imaging scan--before and after participation in one of the interventions. We hope to learn whether different approaches to instruction change the brain in different ways. Data collection runs through Spring 2019. 

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