Parents of children enrolled in Grade 1 at partnering schools will receive consent
materials and those who provide consent will complete a brief background/demographic
survey about their child. For children whose parents provide informed consent, research
staff will (a) ask their educator to confirm basic English proficiency and lack of
profound disabilities or behavior issues that severely impair classroom functioning, (b)
seek the child's assent to project activities, and (c) administer a language screener in
a quiet location at their respective school, either in a small group of other consented
children or one-on-one. In order to qualify as eligible for the intervention phase of the
study, consented children must: (1) be enrolled in Grade 1 (per educator or parent
report) (2) score at or below the empirically derived cut-score on the OWL screener
(obtained via direct testing), (3) exhibit at least basic skills in speaking and
understanding English (per educator report), (4) not exhibit behavioral difficulties
sufficiently severe to prevent participation in the intervention (per educator report),
(5) not have a severe disability that would prevent participation in the intervention
(per educator report), (6) assent to study activities. Children who meet all eligibility
criteria, including scoring below our cutoff on the language screener, will be
categorized as potentially eligible for enrollment in the intervention phase of the
study. In order to enroll children within a particular school, the investigators must
identify a minimum of 6 eligible participants in that school. The investigators will cap
the child participants per school at a maximum of 20 in cohort 1 and 10 in cohorts 2 & 3
to allow for later analysis of nested data (children nested within schools; the
investigators need 40 schools for appropriate statistical power). Children who are
identified as potentially eligible but who attend schools with fewer than 6 total
eligible participants, or who consent to the study but have not yet been screened by the
time the investigators identify 20 eligible participants in cohort 1 and 10 in cohorts 2
& 3 will be excluded from further participation. In schools in which the investigators
have more than the allotted potentially eligible children, the investigators will
randomly select the cohort-specific number to enroll in the intervention phase of the
study. Children enrolled in the intervention phase of the study will be randomly assigned
to receive the Let's Know! intervention or to a business-as-usual control condition.
Random assignment will be conducted by Dr. Flemming at KUMC, who will be uninvolved in
recruitment, screening, and pretest activities. Prior to intervention start, all enrolled
children will complete pretest assessments to measure the lower-level and higher-level
language skills targeted by the Let's Know! intervention, comprehension skills, and other
abilities (i.e., covariates and moderators for addressing Aim 3). All direct child
assessments are listed in Table 1 above. All child direct assessments (screening,
pretest, curriculum-aligned measures, posttest, follow-up) will be administered by
trained research staff in quiet locations at children's respective schools; alternative
arrangements to conduct assessments in the PIs' research laboratories or community
locations (e.g., public library) will be made as necessary (e.g., if a child moves into a
new, non-partnering school). All but the language screener and Gates-MacGinitie Tests of
Reading will be administered individually, with the two exceptions administered to small
groups or 1:1, dependent on scheduling. Screening and assessment sessions may be audio or
video recorded to allow for accurate scoring and analysis. Following pretest assessments
and assignment to conditions, research staff will provide the Let's Know! intervention to
small groups of 3 to 5 children allocated to the intervention condition at their
respective schools. The Let's Know! intervention provides instruction in the domains of
text structure, integration, word knowledge, and grammar; as such, it targets key
lower-level (vocabulary) and higher-level (e.g., story grammar, comprehension monitoring,
inferencing) language skills to support listening and reading comprehension. The
intervention features manualized, soft-scripted lessons that will be provided in small
groups of 3-5 children 4 times a week for 25-30 minutes. The lessons are organized into
four instructional units that are delivered over 22 weeks. All four instructional units
emphasize repeated readings and explorations of commercial texts, with two units
comprising narrative books and two comprising expository books. All intervention lessons
will be videotaped for purposes of monitoring implementation and coding fidelity. If an
individual child misses a session, this will be documented and the session will not be
made up. If an entire group misses a session (e.g., due to a field trip/school assembly),
the interventionist will wait and deliver that lesson during the next scheduled session
(e.g., one group may miss Animals 12 due to a Tuesday assembly; the interventionist
teaches Animals 12 at the regularly scheduled Wednesday session and proceeds from there).
Children in the control condition will participate in study assessments as noted above
but will not experience the Let's Know! intervention. They will receive business-as-usual
classroom instruction and supports within their schools. That is, the child's family and
school will provide instruction and support for children in the control condition as they
typically would for any child not enrolled in the study. The investigators will document
the interventions received by children in both the intervention and control conditions.