8 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
The main purpose of this clinical trials is to explore short-term effects of coordinated intervention versus the business-as-usual school program on the primary endpoints of post-intervention word-reading fluency and arithmetic fluency. The study population is students who begin 1st grade with delays in word reading and calculations. Students who meet entry criteria are randomly assigned to coordinated intervention across reading and math, reading intervention, math intervention, and a business-as-usual control group (schools' typical program). The 3 researcher-delivered interventions last 15 weeks (3 sessions per week; 30 minutes per session). Students in all 4 conditions are tested before researcher-delivered intervention begins and after it ends.
The overall purpose of this study is to determine feasibility and preliminary efficacy of pet therapy, or human-animal interactions (HAI), for children (5-12 years of age) with or at risk for LD. Children among 4 reading groups will be randomly assigned to a HAI intervention or control group. The 2 HAI intervention reading groups will receive visits from a registered canine team during children's small group reading sessions twice a week over 12 weeks. The 2 control reading groups will receive care as usual and offered a 1-time visit from the dog at the end of the study (after T3 completed). Two weeks of initial work will focus on preliminary modifications to the protocol. Parents will complete electronic measures of psychological outcomes (child depression, anxiety, QOL) via REDCap at baseline (T1), 2 weeks post-baseline (T2), and 12 weeks post-baseline (T3). The investigators will obtain copies of reading assessments already conducted by the teachers at T1 and T3. Children's salivary cortisol will be obtained from participants in the intervention groups at T1, T2, and T3. Children and their parents will complete concluding interviews at study end (T3) to further inform what they liked and did not like about the intervention. Results of the proposed study will provide critical data for a future full-scale randomized clinical trial (R01) to examine the impact of HAI on psychological, physiological, and reading outcomes in children with or at risk for LD.
This study investigates the efficacy of a reading comprehension intervention for English learners in Grades 6 and 7 with reading difficulties. Building on previous intervention studies conducted with students in Grades 4 through 8 over the past 10 years, the investigators utilize a longitudinal, double-cohort design utilizing a randomized control trial assigning students to supplemental reading intervention (RISE) or a no intervention "business as usual" (BAU) comparison condition (i.e., Cohort 1 - Years 1 and 2; 205 students in treatment and 205 in control condition; Cohort 2 - Years 3 and 4; 205 students in treatment and 205 in control condition; total 410 in each condition). Students in each cohort will be treated for 2 years (i.e., 6th and 7th grades or 7th and 8th grades). The primary outcome is reading comprehension. The investigators hypothesize that participants receiving the RISE intervention will outperform those receiving BAU instruction across reading-related elements, including word reading, fluency, and comprehension at end of year two of treatment.
The current literature on academic skill difficulties, whether considered as part of the continuum of ability or as a specific learning disability (LD), indicates that these problems often coexist with conduct problems and juvenile delinquency, and are risk factors for initial law-breaking behavior and for its persistence. However, less is understood about how this relationship develops. It is these broad questions that this project seeks to address. First, what is the causal pathway? Does LD cause delinquency, delinquency cause LD, or are both caused by something else? And can big data analytics applied to statewide datasets of information about juvenile justice (JJ) involvement help to answer this question? Second, as it is known that learning to read and do math (and thus becoming more employable) increases the likelihood of desistance (i.e., not committing any more illegal acts), what are the necessary parts of an intervention designed to teach these skills? And what role might technology play in such an intervention? To answer these questions, we will implement a study that includes two components, (a) a big data component and (b) an intervention component. For (a), we will work with a large historical dataset from the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department. For (b), we will work, in total, with 192 (48 per year) delinquent youth with severe LD in residential placement. These individuals, in a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design, will be offered an educational therapy designed to address severe reading problems in juvenile detainees using a novel mixed media intervention in which the person-to-person intensive 1:1 component is completed while youth are in residential settings (24 sessions, delivered in 90 minute settings 3 times a week) and a "gamified" educational smartphone learning tool follow-up completed upon release (with appropriate network fidelity monitoring and participant reinforcement). The person-to-person component is developed specifically for juvenile offenders with severe LD, combining two well-established and highly-regarded intervention programs designed to systematically build students' repertoire of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules as well as develop comprehensive reading skills, from beginning reading to proficiency.
Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) is a common genetic disorder that is associated with a four times greater risk of learning disabilities, including reading disabilities, and a deficiency of neurofibromin - a protein important in a signaling pathway that regulates learning and memory. Our previous work (NS49096) demonstrated that school-age children with NF+RD can respond to standard phonologically-based reading tutoring originally developed to treat reading disability in the general population. Combining our work with that by other researchers suggesting that a medication (Lovastatin) may counteract the effects of the deficient neurofibromin, and possibly ameliorate learning disabilities in NF1, the investigator propose to examine the synergistic effects of medication plus reading tutoring.
The goal of this trial is to determine if children with neurofibromatosis type 1 who have reading disabilities respond the same way-both behaviorally and neurobiologically-to specialized treatment programs as children with idiopathic reading disabilities do, and to determine which intervention is best for particular learner profiles.
This project is evaluating programs to improve reading and writing skills in children who have or are at risk for having reading disabilities. The project focuses on children who are at-risk for low achievement in school and on children with dyslexia.
Children with language-learning disabilities (LLD) have language and reading skills that are weaker than those of typically developing children. In the school-age years, reading is a primary means of exposure to new vocabulary for typically developing children. Although these children would not be expected to master a new word through a single exposure to it in text, children show evidence of partial word knowledge growth (e.g., Wagovich \& Newhoff, 2004). The purpose of this project is to characterize the partial word knowledge growth of children with LLD, in comparison to children with typical language skills. Five forms of partial word knowledge (e.g., orthographic, word discrimination, syntactic, emotional content, and general semantic domain knowledge) are being measured. The study's hypotheses are that children with LLD, like typically developing peers, will demonstrate partial word knowledge growth from exposure to unfamiliar words in text, but that they will show a different pattern of growth across the five forms of partial word knowledge being assessed.