Douglas B. Petersen

Emerging Procedures in Narrative Assessment: The Index of Narrative Complexity.

This article summarizes norm-referenced and criterion-referenced measures of narration and introduces a new criterion-referenced narrative scoring system called the Index of Narrative Complexity (INC). The INC was designed to be used as a progress-monitoring tool. A preliminary study of the use of this scoring system is reported that yielded evidence suggesting that the INC can be scored consistently, yields similar scores across five elicitation formats, is sensitive to change after intervention, and correlates highly with the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004). These results support the use of the INC as a clinical tool for evaluating the outcomes of narrative intervention.

A Systematic Review of Narrative-Based Language Intervention With Children Who Have Language Impairment

This systematic review focuses on research articles published since 1980 that assess outcomes of narrative-based language intervention for preschool and school-age children with language impairment. The author conducted a comprehensive search of electronic databases and hand searches of other sources for studies using all research designs except nonexperimental case studies. The results of the studies were converted to a common metric using effect sizes. The review yielded nine studies that met inclusion criteria. The majority of studies reported moderate to large effect sizes for narrative macrostructure and microstructure. Although the results of the studies were generally positive, each of the studies had a limited number of participants, limited experimental control, and considerable variation in the procedures and materials used. Clinicians should be cautious when interpreting the results of these studies. Narrative intervention is at an emerging stage of evidence and needs further investigation.

Systematic Individualized Narrative Language Intervention on the Personal Narratives of Children With Autism

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an individualized, systematic language intervention on the personal narratives of children with autism. METHOD A single-subject, multiple-baseline design across participants and behaviors was used to examine the effect of the intervention on language features of personal narratives. Three 6- to 8-year-old boys with autism participated in 12 individual intervention sessions that targeted 2-3 story grammar elements (e.g., problem, plan) and 3-4 linguistic complexity elements (e.g., causal subordination, adverbs) selected from each participants baseline performance. Intervention involved repeated retellings of customized model narratives and the generation of personal narratives with a systematic reduction of visual and verbal scaffolding. Independent personal narratives generated at the end of each baseline, intervention, and maintenance session were analyzed for presence and sophistication of targeted features. RESULTS Graphical and statistical results showed immediate improvement in targeted language features as a function of intervention. There was mixed evidence of maintenance 2 and 7 weeks after intervention. CONCLUSION Children with autism can benefit from an individualized, systematic intervention targeting specific narrative language features. Greater intensity of intervention may be needed to gain enduring effects for some language features.

Effects of an Individualized Narrative Intervention on Children’s Storytelling and Comprehension Skills:

Narrative skills that are important for preschoolers include retelling stories, telling personal stories, and answering questions about stories. Narrative abilities form the foundation of reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an individually delivered language intervention on the narrative skills of preschoolers with developmental disabilities. Five preschoolers attending Head Start and participating in special education received 24 sessions of intervention each lasting 10 to 15 min. A multiple baseline, multiple probe experimental design was used to investigate the effects of the intervention, which incorporated visual supports (e.g., icons and pictures) and retell and personal storytelling practice, on story retells, personal stories, and story comprehension. Improvements on all three measures were related to the intervention. Parents and teachers reported that the storytelling activities were engaging, enjoyable, and produced improvements in the children’s language skills.

Large group narrative intervention in Head Start preschools: Implications for response to intervention

This study investigated the effect of a large group narrative intervention on diverse preschoolers’ narrative language skills with aims to explore questions of treatment efficacy and differential response to intervention. A quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest comparison group research design was employed with 71 preschool children. Classrooms were randomly assigned to treatment and comparison conditions. Intervention consisted of explicit teaching of narrative structure via repeated story retell practice, illustrations and icons, and peer mediation. Children’s narrative language and comprehension were assessed at Pretest, Posttest, and 4 weeks after treatment. Statistically significant differences between treatment and comparison groups were found on retell and story comprehension measures. A priori classification criteria resulted in 28 percent of the participants identified as Minimal Responders on the story retell measure and 19 percent as Minimal Responders on the story comprehension measure. Children who were dual-language learners did not have a different pattern of response than monolingual English speakers. Low-intensity narrative intervention delivered to a large group of children was efficacious and can serve as a targeted language intervention for use within preschool classrooms. A culturally and linguistically appropriate, dynamic approach to assessment identified children for whom intensified intervention would be recommended.

Predicting Reading Difficulty in First Grade Using Dynamic Assessment of Decoding in Early Kindergarten A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the classification accuracy of early static prereading measures and early dynamic assessment reading measures administered to 600 kindergarten students. At the beginning of kindergarten, all of the participants were administered two commonly used static prereading measures. The participants were then administered either a dynamic assessment featuring an onset-rime decoding strategy or a dynamic assessment featuring a sound-by-sound strategy. At the end of first grade, those same participants’ reading ability was assessed using multiple reading measures. Results indicated that the dynamic assessments yielded significantly higher classification accuracy over the static measures, but that the classification accuracy of the two dynamic assessments did not differ significantly. Sensitivity for the static measures was less than 80%, and specificity ranged from 33% to 51%. The sensitivity and specificity for the dynamic assessments was greater than 80% for all children, with the exception of specificity for the Hispanic children, which was at or greater than 70%. Results also indicated that the combination of static and dynamic measures did not improve the classification accuracy over the dynamic assessments alone. Dynamic assessment appears to be a promising approach to classifying young children at risk for future reading difficulty.

Predicting Reading Ability for Bilingual Latino Children Using Dynamic Assessment.

This study investigated the predictive validity of a dynamic assessment designed to evaluate later risk for reading difficulty in bilingual Latino children at risk for language impairment. During kindergarten, 63 bilingual Latino children completed a dynamic assessment nonsense-word recoding task that yielded pretest to posttest gain scores, residuum gain scores, and modifiability scores. At the end of first grade, the same participants completed criterion reading measures of word identification, decoding, and reading fluency. The dynamic assessment yielded high classification accuracy, with sensitivity and specificity at or above 80% for all three criterion reading measures, including 100% sensitivity for two out of the three first-grade measures. The dynamic assessment used in this study has promise as a means for predicting first-grade word-level reading ability in Latino, bilingual children.

Tier 2 Language Intervention for Diverse Preschoolers: An Early-Stage Randomized Control Group Study Following an Analysis of Response to Intervention

PURPOSE The first purpose of this study was to explore the use of a whole class, test-teach-test, dynamic assessment of narratives for identifying participants. The second purpose was to examine the efficacy of a Tier 2 narrative language intervention for culturally and linguistically diverse preschoolers. METHOD A dynamic assessment was conducted with students from 3 Head Start classrooms. On the basis of the results of the dynamic assessment, 22 children were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 12) and control (n = 10) groups for intervention. Participants received a small-group (4:1), differentiated, narrative intervention for 15-20 min, twice a week, for 9 weeks. Interventionists used weekly progress monitoring data to explicitly focus on individualized narrative and linguistic targets. RESULTS The treatment group showed significant improvement over the control group on proximal and distal measures of narrative retells, with large effect sizes. Group differences on a measure of childrens language in the context of personal stories were not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS This early-stage study provides evidence that narrative language intervention is an effective approach to improving the language skills of preschoolers with diverse language needs. Furthermore, the evidence supports the use of dynamic assessment for reducing overidentification and identifying candidates for small-group language intervention.

Cross-linguistic interactions from second language to first language as the result of individualized narrative language intervention with children with and without language impairment

This study investigated the extent to which results of English narrative intervention interacted cross-linguistically with Spanish for 73 bilingual children. We employed a quasi-experimental design, using matched-pairs random assignment for children with typically developing language and a nonrandom block design for children with language impairment. At pretest and posttest we elicited three different English and Spanish narrative retells. We conducted two 25-min, individualized narrative intervention sessions in English with the treatment group, focusing on causal subordination and story grammar. The results indicated that the English narrative intervention was efficacious for both causal subordination and story grammar. They also indicated that the typically developing children had significantly greater cross-linguistic transfer of causal subordination and story grammar than did the children with language impairment.

Using Narrative Intervention to Accelerate Canonical Story Grammar and Complex Language Growth in Culturally Diverse Preschoolers.

Oral narratives are a commonly used, meaningful means of communication that reflects academic language. New state curriculum standards include narrative-related language expectations for young school-age children, including story grammar and complex language. This article provides a review of preschool narrative-based language intervention studies, with special attention to how the intervention accelerated young childrens story grammar and complex language beyond developmental expectations, meeting or even exceeding recently adopted state language standards. In addition, we provide an overview of a narrative-based language intervention used with culturally and linguistically diverse preschoolers to prepare them for meeting the language standards in elementary school. Evidence supports a conclusion that personal-themed stories that are developmentally and socially appropriate for preschoolers can strengthen childrens use of mainstream story grammar and complex language, which will be an asset to them in elementary school.