Karen Erickson, Claire Greer, and colleagues from the University of North Carolina received funding to make shared reading more broadly accessible to students with significant cognitive disabilities. The grant is a federally funded project by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), Stepping Up. The research will focus on the widely used Tar Heel reader. Tar Heel Shared Reader is a literacy intervention/strategy developed by Drs. Karen Erickson (PI) and Gary Bishop.
The project, Tar Heel Shared Reader, aims to support students with significant cognitive disabilities who are not yet reading connected text. The project will combine the library of appropriate books in Tar Heel Reader with a new shared reading interface in order to engage students more actively in constructing meaning from texts in order to improve and increase interactions while supporting improved academic success. The books will be aligned with grade level content and standards. Additionally, they will be written at a level the particular students with significant cognitive disabilities can understand. This project will build upon the evidence base in shared reading while using an affordable support available to all teachers.
Tar Heel Shared Reader will utilize Tar Heel Reader. Tar Heel Reader is a widely used, open-source (available to all) program. Tar Heel Reader gives teachers a tool to engage students with texts, align texts with grade level content and standards to support language and literacy outcomes. In Tar Heel Reader, educators can find books by searching by topic or rapidly create books using images in Flickr or by uploading their own images.
Contact: Karen Erickson, Erickson@unc.edu
Link: http://tarheelreader.org