Literacy Instruction Through Media for Everyone

Browse trials for

• Literacy 201

Keywords

• Literacy
• Media
• Shared reading
• Poverty
• Parents
• Intervention
• Preschool
• Television

Literacy

201 studies on the registry are indexed under Literacy; 69 are open to participants now.

This study's planned enrollment of 450 is above the median of 124 across 170 interventional studies indexed under Literacy.

Lead sponsor

Ohio State University is the lead sponsor of 663 studies on the registry; 148 are open to participants now.

Of its 67 completed or terminated interventional studies of FDA-regulated products, 49 (73%) have results posted.

Study arms

• Experimental
  Media instruction

  Caregivers will be asked to implement joint media sessions with their child four times per week for 12 weeks using lightly adapted versions of the commercially-available Super Why! program, which focuses on early literacy skills, including alphabet knowledge, rhyming, spelling, and print concepts. Sessions are anticipated to last 20 minutes. Caregivers will be trained by researchers on explicit strategies to use to promote children's learning. Caregivers will digitally log every session and audio record 1 session each week.

  Behavioral: Media instruction

• Active comparator
  Storybook instruction

  Caregivers will be asked to implement joint storybook reading sessions with their child four times per week for 12 weeks using adapted versions of the commercially -available Super-Why! storybooks, which focus on early literacy skills including alphabet knowledge, rhyming, spelling, and print concepts. Sessions are anticipated to last 20 minutes. Caregivers will be trained by researchers on explicit strategies to use to promote children's learning. Caregivers will digitally log every session and audio record 1 session each week.

  Behavioral: Storybook intervention

• No intervention
  Business-as-usual control

  Caregivers will be asked to log any joint learning activities they engage in with their child but will not be provided with any specific materials or instructions.

Interventions

• BehavioralMedia instruction

  Caregivers will be asked to implement joint media sessions with their child four times per week for 12 weeks using lightly adapted versions of the commercially-available Super Why! program, which focuses on early literacy skills, including alphabet knowledge, rhyming, spelling, and print concepts. Sessions are anticipated to last 20 minutes. Caregivers will be trained by researchers on explicit strategies to use to promote children's learning. Caregivers will digitally log every session and audio record 1 session each week

• BehavioralStorybook intervention

  Caregivers will be asked to implement joint storybook reading sessions with their child four times per week for 12 weeks using adapted versions of the commercially -available Super-Why! storybooks, which focus on early literacy skills including alphabet knowledge, rhyming, spelling, and print concepts. Sessions are anticipated to last 20 minutes. Caregivers will be trained by researchers on explicit strategies to use to promote children's learning. Caregivers will digitally log every session and audio record 1 session each week.

Primary outcomes

1. Print concept knowledge

   Children are administered the Preschool Word and Print Awareness (PWPA) measure (Justice et al., 2006), which examines children's knowledge of 16 basic print concepts. The PWPA has high inter-rater reliability (96% to 100%, Justice \& Ezell, 200), acceptable internal consistency (#= .7; Dobbs- Oates et al., 2015) and can reliably estimate preschoolers' print-concept knowledge (Justice et al., 2006).

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment and at posttest after the 12 week intervention period

2. Alphabet knowledge

   Children are administered the Alphabet Knowledge subtest of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening - Preschool (PALS-PreK; Invernizzi et al., 2001). Children are presented with uppercase and lowercase letters printed in random order and receive a point for each letter named correctly. Cronbach's alphas average average .86. Inter-rater reliability is \>.96 (Invernizzi et al., 2004). The full PALS-PreK test is highly correlated with measures of reading ability (e.g., Test of Early Reading Ability, r= .67) and predicts later performance on a similar literacy measure (rs \> .53). Further, this subtest has high predictive validity in discriminating children who will later be identified as needing additional instruction (Invernizzi et al., 2001).

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment and at posttest after the 12 week intervention period

3. Name Writing

   Children are administered the Name Writing subtest from the PALS-PreK. In the Name Writing subtest, the child is asked to draw a picture of themselves and then write their name. They are then asked to show the assessor their name. Only the written name is scored. This subtests has high inter-rater reliability (.99). As noted above, the full test has good convergent and predictive validity (Invernizzi et al., 2001).

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment and at posttest after the 12 week intervention period

4. Phonological Awareness

   Children are administered two subtests from the PALS-PreK. In the Beginning Sound Awareness subtest, the child is asked to produce the beginning sound of a word. This subtests has acceptable reliability (# = .93) and inter-rater reliability is high (.99). As noted above, the full test has good convergent and predictive validity (Invernizzi et al., 2001). The Rhyme Awareness subtest was removed in February 2026 due to feasibility concerns identified in early study data.

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment and at posttest after the 12 week intervention period

5. Word reading

   At all timepoints, children are administered the Letter-Word Identification subtest of the Woodcock Johnson IV Test of Achievement (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew \& Mather, 2014). This subtest requires children to identify or read isolated letters and words orally. This subtest has adequate internal-consistency (.94; Schrank \& Wendling, 2018). It has a high factor loading onto the Broad Reading cluster (.92; McGrew et al., 2014) which is highly correlated with other measures of reading like the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT) Total Reading (.89; Schrank \& Wendling, 2018). It is strongly correlated with general school readiness (r = .84) as measured by the Differential Ability Scales (McGrew et al., 2014).

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment, at posttest after the 12 week intervention period, at 3-month follow up, at 6-month follow-up, and at 12- month follow up

6. Spelling

   At all timepoints, children are administered the Spelling subtest from the WJ IV, requiring children to draw lines, trace and write letters, and spell orally presented words. This subtest has adequate internal-consistency reliability (.92; Schrank \& Wendling, 2018) and a high factor loading onto the Broad Written Language Cluster (.87), which is highly correlated with other measures of writing like WIAT Written Expression (.77; McGrew et al., 2014). This subtest is moderately correlated (r = .69) with general school readiness as measured by the Differential Ability Scales (McGrew et al., 2014).

   Time frame: At pretest after enrollment, at posttest after the 12 week intervention period, at 3-month follow up, at 6-month follow-up, and at 12- month follow up

Secondary outcomes

1. Enjoyment of intervention activities

   Enjoyment of intervention activities is measured to assess the extent to which the media intervention circumvents barriers related to caregiver difficulty and discomfort with reading. Enjoyment will be measured with three items: "How do you think today's session went?", "How much did you enjoy these sessions?", and "How uncomfortable or difficult did you find these sessions?"

   Time frame: Four times per week during the 12-week intervention and at posttest after the intervention

2. Perceived value of intervention activities

   Perceived value of intervention activities is measured to assess the extent to which the media intervention reduces barriers related to a limited understanding of the benefits of shared-reading activities. Two items are used: "How much did these sessions help your child's development?" and "How much did these sessions help your child learn about letters and how to read simple words?".

   Time frame: At posttest after the 12 week intervention period

3. Ease of Scheduling

   Ease of fitting activities into schedule is measured to assess the extent to which the media intervention reduces the time pressure barrier. One item asks: "How easy was it to fit this session into your family's schedule?"

   Time frame: At posttest after the 12 week intervention period

4. Caregiver Adherence

   Caregivers will be trained in procedures for using a digital Qualtrics log to track use of the intervention activities. The log will be preloaded as a bookmark onto the home screen of each tablet and will ask participants to note the episode watched.

   Time frame: Throughout the 12-week intervention

5. Quantity of print-related talk

   Audio-recorded intervention sessions will be coded by trained research staff to document the quantity of print-related talk within each session. Specifically, the Fidelity Coding Catalog (FCC) coding scheme was developed to document caregiver-child talk during reading sessions and is a reliable event-based coding system measuring frequency and quantity of print-focused talk. The FCC captures, for instance, every adult utterance that contains print-related key words, such as letter, word, and read. The quantity of print-related talk as measured by the FCC is an important index of intervention adherence but also represents a key mechanism through which intervention impacts early literacy development (McGinty et al., 2011).

   Time frame: Throughout the 12-week intervention

Individual participant data

Plan to share: Yes — This project will generate quantitative data from 450 families and children, which will be used to assess the efficacy of a media-based early literacy intervention. The data will be collected via direct assessments, questionnaires, applications loaded onto provided tablets, and audio and video observations. The primary final, cleaned data will consist of a single comma-delimited file for all valid responses. Transcription records will be stored as text files and audio/video files will be stored as MP3/4 files. Upon publication of major findings from the proposed study, the primary data file, transcripts, and audio and video files will be shared with other researchers through the Open Science Framework (primary comma-delimited data file), Databrary (audio and video files), and CHILDES/TalkBank (transcripts).

Time frame: Data will be made available upon publication of major findings from the proposed study. Study data deposited in the OSF, Databrary, and CHILDES/TalkBank will be available to the research community in perpetuity.

Access criteria: Deidentified datasets will be made available as public use data on the OSF. Data with potentially personally identifiable information, such as audio or video, will be shared in more restricted manner via Databrary. Databrary provides data access to authorized users who have been granted secure access by Databrary's administrators. Only researchers with Principal Investigator status from institutions with Institutional Review Boards or similar review entities, or researchers affiliated with Principal Investigators, will be authorized for access. Transcripts will be shared via CHILDES/TalkBank and will be redacted as needed to remove potentially personally identifiable information.