Tivnan Presented International Reading Association Research Award

Professor Terrence Tivnan was announced winner of the International Reading Association’s 2007 Dina Feitelson Research Award in May. He shares the award with Lowry Hemphill of Wheelock College for their paper, “Comparing Four Literacy Reform Models in High-Poverty Schools: Patterns of First-Grade Achievement.”

“It was a real honor to be recognized by our colleagues at the International Reading Association,” Tivnan says. “My colleague Lowry Hemphill and I are grateful to have been selected for an award that is aimed at recognizing research on early reading and literacy, and we are proud to be part of HGSE’s long tradition of important work on literacy development.”

The research paper, published in The Elementary School Journal in May 2005, reported on a study comparing the impact of four different approaches to teaching early reading and writing. The study involved over 700 students in 16 public schools in Boston.

“The research for our paper focused on first-grade classrooms in the Boston Public Schools, and we were very pleased to be part of a successful collaboration with the students, teachers, and administrators in Boston,” Tivnan says. “They were important contributors to our success, as were the many HGSE master’s and doctoral students who helped us with the research.”

The study’s findings indicated that the literacy models were similar in their overall effectiveness in helping students, despite differences in pedagogical approaches.  Programs showed high rates of success in expanding word reading and phonics skills during first grade.  Smaller gains were found in vocabulary and reading comprehension.  The pedagogical skills and orientations of individual teachers were the largest sources of variability in first-grade outcomes, apart from differences in children’s abilities.

The Dina Feitelson Research Award was established to honor the memory of Dina Feitelson by recognizing an outstanding empirical study published in English in a refereed journal.