Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL): Results of a Multi-site RCT

Overview

Narration has been shown to be a foundational skill for literacy development in school-age children.  Elementary teachers routinely conduct classroom lessons that focus on reading decoding and comprehension, but they rarely provide instruction in oral narration (Hall et al., 2021).

The Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program was developed by Drs. Sandi and Ron Gillam in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education, with funding from a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences.  The SKILL program was designed to address the narrative language needs of elementary students at risk for language and literacy difficulties. 

The purpose of this project was to rigorously evaluate the SKILL program in an efficacy trial and to determine whether training in oral narration impacted the use of higher-level language, reading comprehension and written language.

Research

Instructional Approach
The SKILL narrative instruction program consists of three phases: (1) Teaching Story Structure and Causal Language, (2) Teaching Strategies for Creating a Situation Model, and (3) Teaching Strategies for Integration into Long-Term Memory. Phase 1 contains 20 lessons that provide students with an understanding of the main story elements, including characters, setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, actions, and consequences in the context of wordless picture stories. Each story element is associated with a representative icon, which is situated on a sequenced storyboard that serves as a graphic organizer. In Phase 2, students are taught linguistic structures, concepts, and vocabulary in more elaborate, complex stories. Finally, Phase 3 provides students multiple opportunities to retell, create, tell, edit, and revise their own spontaneously generated stories with and without icon and graphic organizer support. 

Procedures

The research team measured the efficacy of the SKILL program in a randomized controlled trial.  We screened 3,380 students in Grades 1- 4 at participating elementary schools. A total of 358 students who scored in the at-risk range on a reading comprehension measure and a narrative measure were enrolled in the study.

Students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) SKILL intervention or (2) business as usual.  Students were identified for participation based on performance on standardized reading comprehension and narrative language screeners.  Students received 36 SKILL lessons over 8 to 12 weeks.  At the end of instruction, students were assessed on their narrative and literacy understanding and skills by blinded examiners.  Several standardized and researcher-developed measures were used to assess student growth at posttest and 5-month follow-up.  The main treatment effects were evaluated at the student level by comparing conditional posttest means for the SKILL group and the business-as-usual group in the context of nested models with students nested within teachers and teachers nested within schools.

Results

• Students who received the SKILL treatment significantly outperformed students in the business-as-usual (BAU) condition on measures of oral narrative comprehension and production immediately after treatment and at follow-up five months later (Gillam et al, 2023; ED622886).
• Improvements in oral narration generalized to a measure of written narration at post-test and the treatment advantage was maintained at follow-up (Gillam et al, 2023; ED622886).
• Grade level did not moderate effects for oral narration, but it did for reading comprehension, with a higher impact for students in grades three and four (Gillam et al, 2023; ED622886).
• Moderation results showed that the effects of SKILL did not vary for monolinguals or bilinguals based on their pre-intervention language performance (Capin et al., 2023).
• Structural equation modeling showed that children’s narrative ability at posttest mediated the relationship between treatment and reading comprehension suggesting that narrative ability is the mechanism by which treatment generalized to reading comprehension (Gillam et al., forthcoming).

Contact Information

Ron Gillam, PhD, Project Director

ron.gillam@usu.edu

Principal Investigators

Ron Gillam

Sandra Gillam

Non-USU Principal Investigators

Sharon Vaughn

Greg Roberts

Collaborative Partners

The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk

The University of Texas at Austin

Funding Agency

U.S. Department of Education, Institute on Education Sciences

Sites

14 elementary schools in Texas and Utah