Headed back to the ASHA Convention in-person (for the first time since 2019!). Below is some information about our lab presentations and a few highlights:

• Lisa Fitton & Juliana Ronderos (Boston University) received an ASHA Research Mentoring-Pair Travel Award! They will be participating in the Bilingual Research Symposium all day on Friday.
  
• We're presenting data from the BiRDI Project for the first time! Check out Lauren Thayer's presentation on Thursday evening for some preliminary data.
  

Fitton, L., Pratt, A., & Chow, J. (2022, November). Practical evidence in bilingual language assessment: Implications for evaluation, decision making, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Seminar presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. New Orleans, LA. (National)

Thayer, L., Fitton, L., Crosby-Quinatoa, G., & Goodrich, J. M. (2022, November). Bilingual exposure, narrative language, and norm-referenced assessment: Relations across Spanish and English. Technical Research presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. New Orleans, LA. (National)

Manaal Ahmed joined the Literacy Development among Diverse Learners (LDDL) team in the fall of 2019. She was involved in building the lab, supporting the adjustments and changes to the team during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and growing our work into increasingly meaningful spaces. After graduating from UofSC, Manaal remained involved through a research manuscript she co-authored alongside Molly Morgan. She completed the manuscript while  working outside jobs and applying to medical school. Other key contributions include Manaal's work co-designing an Independent Study course she completed during Spring 2020 (adapting her plans considerably in response to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic) and her efforts spearheading the development of lab training materials to support new team members in learning lab protocols for standardized assessment administration. 

Manaal has contributed to the lab through a wide variety of activities (see list at the bottom of this feature), but there are three specific areas that stand out:

1. Leadership & Collaboration
2. Scholarship & Academic Writing
3. Cultural Responsiveness

Manaal has shown both her leadership and collaborative approach to teamwork in a variety of ways during her time in the lab. Not only has she lead by example in her reliability, dependability, and responsiveness to feedback, but Manaal is also thoughtful in her interactions with other team members. She earned her position as a key collaborator on a UofSC Magellan Scholar grant (led by Molly Morgan) through her insightful feedback and ability to deliver constructive comments effectively. Her knowledge base and experience lead to her earning a paid role collaborating on the grant. Manaal has further demonstrated her leadership in her work supporting new team members through onboarding and training in the lab. A specific example is her efforts in designing training materials. To do this work well, she needed to consider the perspectives of team members with various levels of experience. She developed the materials carefully, resulting in training resources that are highly effective for increasing team member fidelity in completing work assignments. We still use her materials in the lab today.

Manaal is also a highly skilled writer. Through her involvement on the Magellan Scholar grant, Manaal began contributing to the write-up of a research manuscript currently under review for publication. As second author, Manaal contributed substantially to the data collection, qualitative analyses (forward and backward coding), interpretation of results, and writing of the literature review, results, and discussion. She was highly involved throughout the development of the project, which was based on phone interviews with Spanish-speaking families regarding their children's linguistic experiences at home, family background, and sibling involvement in the home. Manaal provided feedback during the iterative refinement of survey procedures based on participant comments, and wrote much of the manuscript completed in spring 2022. Her aptitude for research writing has been evident throughout the drafting of the work; Manaal quickly took and implemented feedback to strengthen the paper. The final manuscript, entitled "The BiRDI Home Environment Questionnaire: A tool to promote conversation between Spanish-speaking families and early education providers in the U.S.", is currently under review for publication in an educational research journal.

Perhaps Manaal's most important strength to highlight is her knowledge and experience working with individuals from cultural and linguistic backgrounds that are different from her own. As a bilingual English-Urdu speaker and an Indian American individual, Manaal is both highly aware of and has experience navigating cultural and linguistic marginalization in the U.S. She has drawn on her personal experiences, in combination with her experience working across cultural and linguistic lines (e.g., Spanish-English and Cantonese-English), to build skills that are conducive to improving accessibility in healthcare and in communication. This was evident in her work in the lab and in her contributions to our manuscript, which centers on better understanding Spanish-speaking families’ experiences and improving culturally responsive educational practice in the home. Manaal's strengths in this area have been further demonstrated in her efforts collaborating with two fellow team members to develop resources for administrative staff at a local elementary school to encourage more culturally-responsive interactions with Spanish-speaking families of students enrolled at the school (see several examples here). She has an incredible growth mindset that is critical to effective practice and is well-positioning to continue to learn to support her patients in ways that align well with their backgrounds, needs, and culture.

• Partnered with Molly Morgan to complete a Magellan Scholar grant awarded in Spring 2020 (i.e., beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic).
  
• University Scholar Award to attend University of South Carolina (competitive award upon entry to UofSC for students with high ACT/SAT scores and excellent grades )
  
• Capstone Scholar at University of South Carolina
  
• Completed a one-on-one Independent Study course with Dr. Fitton in Spring 2020 focusing on bilingual language and literacy.
  
• Literature reviews & reference management: bilingual language development research
• Provided feedback on the research writing of other lab members working on research manuscripts.
• Data entry, cross-checking, and fidelity checks (data management)
• Administered standardized educational assessments in Spanish and English to children in PreK-Grade 1 at a local elementary school
• Trained other undergraduate lab members in reliable test administration, scoring, data entry, and data management
• Personally developed and built quizzes to support team members learning to administer assessment with fidelity. This work is still used in the lab today
• Contributed to the development of training content and materials related to cultural responsiveness, with particular emphasis on in-classroom strategies to increase inclusivity for children from all backgrounds.

*This is not an exhaustive list. It would not be possible to put onto paper everything Manaal has done to build (and build up) the LDDL Team.

This individual team member feature coincides with an exciting announcement for our lab: we just received the notice of award for our first NIH grant here in the UofSC LDDL Lab!  The project focuses on investigating educational assessment approaches to help us identify Spanish-English speaking children at risk for difficulty learning to read and write. The project will be conducted in collaboration with Texas A&M University (PI Marc Goodrich, with current PhD Student Lauren Thayer).

• Fitton, L., & Goodrich, J. M. (Multiple PD/PI) with Co-Investigator Gina Crosby-Quinatoa, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, Language difference or difficulty learning? Assessing early language skills to identify risk for reading difficulty among young Spanish-English dual language learners (Award Number R21HD106072), August 2021 - July 2023: $420,059

This would not be possible without the support of all of our team members during the last few years. It is fitting that we have the opportunity to highlight Kaiela at the same time we are making this announcement! We would not be where we are today without her.

Along with Jaddey and Molly, Kaiela was among the first to join the Literacy Development among Diverse Learners (LDDL) team in the fall of 2018. Kaiela has been an active contributor from her first day, attending foundational initial lab meetings, sharing feedback on lab policies and procedures, and exhibiting leadership early on to support other team members in working with Spanish-speaking children and their families.  She has been instrumental in establishing the LDDL lab and in inspiring those around her. Since graduating in May 2021, Kaiela has remained an active contributor as she has developed a first-author manuscript (co-authored by Jaddey, Rose Luna, Rachel Hoge, and myself) in preparation for submission to a peer-reviewed journal this fall. She has continued to move this exceptional work forward while working additional jobs, preparing to apply for medical school, and finalizing plans to gain experience working in the medical and/or research field. Kaiela's innovative ideas and aptitude for research are remarkable, evidenced not only by her paper in preparation but also by other ideas she has discussed in poster presentations (see above links) and professional development seminars.

In this feature, there are three specific areas that are particular strengths for Kaiela, though she has contributed to the lab far beyond these key points (see partial list of additional contributions at the bottom of this page):

1. Leadership
2. Analytic Problem-Solving
3. Advocacy for the Hispanic Community

In regards to leadership, Kaiela stands out both within and outside the LDDL Team (notably, Kaiela was president of her sorority Kappa Delta Chi from August 2020 - May 2021 and inducted into the UofSC Hall of Leaders in 2021). Not only has Kaiela led by example since first starting in the lab, but she distinguished herself for her communication skills, problem-solving, and work ethic. In the spring of 2019, Kaiela was one of three individuals selected for a full Research Assistant position. In this role, Kaiela expanded on her strengths to support fellow team members through trainings to administer standardized assessments, develop responsive communication skills to engage individuals from various age groups and backgrounds, and reflect critically on systems of power and how these influence children's educational experiences. Throughout the 2019 year, Kaiela further demonstrated her high-level abilities through problem-solving in thinking about our work more broadly, and constructive supervision and mentorship of new team members. In the fall of 2019, Kaiela earned a peer nomination for LDDL Team Leadership and subsequently a promotion to "Lead Tester" alongside Molly Morgan. The Lead Tester position is the most senior student position on the LDDL Team, and correspondingly requires strong leadership skills including solution-focused critical thinking, setting and communicating clear expectations, and prioritization of overall team well being. Kaiela more than met the requirements for this role, particularly given that she served as a Lead Tester during the start of the lab's first grant (see here) that supported data collection on a fairly large scale in local elementary schools. The team met the grant's goals in record time, an extraordinary feat given that the work was disrupted by COVID-19 pandemic impacts beginning in March 2020. Kaiela was instrumental in moving the LDDL Team's work online and maintaining relationships with lab members during the disruptions and shifts in team functioning.

Kaiela also has clear strengths in analytic problem-solving and critical thinking, most evidently demonstrated by her research projects conducted to improve language and reading assessment for Spanish-English speaking children. She is inquisitive and unsatisfied by cursory solutions to complex challenges. She asks insightful questions and reflects actively, working with her peers to think through problems. Within the lab, these skills have resulted in two high-level research projects, the first of which focused on potential bias in a receptive vocabulary measure designed for Spanish-English speaking children. Kaiela examined the measure for patterns in children's responses, and her findings ultimately resulted in a pivot within the team to use a more culturally-appropriate measure. The second project, which is currently being written up by Kaiela, Jaddey, and Rose, built upon these ideas further and was first generated from discussion initiated by Kaiela about sentence repetition tasks. Kaiela identified patterns in the errors Spanish-English children were making in their responses, and hypothesized that some of the errors could lead to different inferences about the children's underlying language abilities. For example, when a child translates a sentence verbatim, this is likely to suggest higher-level language skills than would rudimentary translation (though for both responses, a child would receive no credit according to standardized procedures). Since initiating the project, Kaiela and Jaddey have both spent innumerable hours transcribing, coding, and cross-checking over 150 audio files generated by kindergarten and first grade students. They have not only developed incredible research skills through this experience, but also have expanded their writing skills (alongside Rose). Beyond this, the work is important and has the potential to inform how speech-language pathologists interpret bilingual children's responses to these types of tasks.

Kaiela is also an incredible advocate for the Hispanic Community. As a first-generation college student and a Hispanic woman, Kaiela not only draws on her personal background experience and strengths to uplift others, but she also encourages those around her to do the same (or better). During the 2019-2021 years, Kaiela specifically volunteered for and then fully planned meetings with fellow lab members to discuss issues in tangible ways. She identified pre-reading materials that would compliment the focal topics, created outlines to guide discussion among team members, and facilitated conversation during the meetings. These meetings were well-attended (despite being held virtually) and resulted in additional reflection among team members weeks afterward. This work also laid the foundation for increased efforts among team members to provide data and resources to advocate for more intentional supports for Spanish-speaking families and children in the public schools. Kaiela volunteered to attend several meetings with local school administrators and contributed greatly to discussions of barriers experienced by families, of recommendations for sustainable support systems, and revision of school-generated plans to promote effective practices in the classroom. These contributions were remarkable, and did not go unnoticed by the administrators - Kaiela received high praise for her advocacy and for her knowledge. The work Kaiela has done cannot be overstated, especially in how it has impacted those around her.

• Inducted into the UofSC Hall of Leaders in 2021
  
• Lead a SCSHA presentation proposal and poster in 2020
• Co-authored a second SCSHA presentation proposal and poster in 2020
• Literature reviews & reference management: bilingual language development research
• Prepared a Magellan Scholar application for submission with Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera in 2019-2020
  
• Data entry, cross-checking, and fidelity checks (data management)
• Administered standardized educational assessments in Spanish and English to children in PreK-Grade 1 at a local elementary school
• Trained other undergraduate lab members in reliable test adminstration, scoring, data entry, and data management
• Contributed to the development of training content and materials related to cultural responsiveness, with particular emphasis on in-classroom strategies to increase inclusivity for children from all backgrounds.
• Contributed to the development of trainings focused on how to work with interpreters in school settings.
  
• President of Kappa Delta Chi Sorority (August 2020 - May 2021)
• Member of the Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Society
• Earned Order of Omega Greek Honor Society membership

*This is not an exhaustive list. It would not be possible to put onto paper everything Kaiela has done to build (and build up) the LDDL Team.

Molly Morgan joined the Literacy Development among Diverse Learners (LDDL) team in the fall of 2018. Alongside Jaddey and Kaiela, she has been closely involved in the initial establishment of the lab, supporting the growth and training of the team, and developing our work into increasingly meaningful spaces. After graduating from UofSC in 2020, Molly has remained active in the lab while also working outside jobs and preparing to apply for medical school. Notably, Molly was awarded a Magellan Scholar Award in Spring 2020 to support her work focused on investigating how home and family systems contribute to Spanish-speaking children's language development. This internal grant is awarded to high-achieving students through a rigorous application and review process conducted by the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of South Carolina.

Molly has contributed to the lab through a wide variety of activities (partial list at the bottom of this feature), but there are three specific areas that stand out:

1. Leadership
2. Scholarship and academic writing
3. Navigating spaces of cultural and linguistic difference

Molly has shown her leadership in many ways, from supervising and guiding others, to leading by example, to amplifying the skills and strengths of those around her. After only a few short months on the LDDL Team in 2018, Molly had already demonstrated strengths in thinking quickly on her feet, being highly teachable, and supporting others on the team. In spring 2019, she moved into a Research Assistant position and quickly became instrumental to the team in brokering our first community research partnership with the Good Samaritan Clinic of Columbia (SC). Molly has volunteered at the free medical Clinic since 2017 (with over 400 volunteer hours logged as of June 2021!). She was integral to the establishment of bilingual language screenings held at the Clinic on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, and to training LDDL Team members to work with Clinic staff and patients visiting the Clinic. This partnership required care, attention, and initiative from Molly, and was key to securing the lab's first external research grant (an ASHFoundation Grant awarded to PIs Lisa Fitton & Marc Goodrich in late 2019). Upon receipt of the grant, Molly was nominated by her peers in the lab for one of two Lead Tester positions alongside Kaiela Campos. In this larger role on the team, Molly was responsible for organizing trips of undergraduate testers to conduct bilingual educational assessments with elementary school students, training lab members, and contributing to day-to-day problem-solving related to the grant. She and Kaiela were essential to the success of the team in reaching the data collection goals of the project in just a few months, prior to major changes made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.

Molly also has clear strengths in scholarship and academic writing. During 2019, she developed her Magellan Scholar grant application. After one round of reviewer feedback, Molly refined the proposal, which was then funded to support her research during 2020. Molly planned for and designed the project, which she had just started to implement when the pandemic halted in-person research. Molly not only adapted the project to be conducted remotely, but also brought  on Manaal Ahmed and several additional team members (including Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera) to develop it into a publication-quality project. She did this while continuing to work as a Lead Tester, contributing to team problem-solving as we shifted our in-person work to all-virtual for the remainder of 2020, and completing her undergraduate studies. In May 2020, Molly graduated with Leadership Distinction on the President's Honor List with a B.A. in Public Health and two Minors, one in Spanish and one in Applied Computing. Since graduating, Molly continued to work with Manaal to write up the project findings into a manuscript that she is lead author on. Molly has conducted the majority of the writing for the work, with Manaal's support as second author. We expect to submit the paper for publication in summer 2021.

It is also important to highlight Molly's experience and ability in navigating spaces of cultural and linguistic difference, particularly in considering how systemic biases and power dynamics influence individual interactions. Molly actively contributes to, engages with, and learns from conversations among team members about racial, cultural, and linguistic stigmatization. Notably, Molly lead an effort with Manaal and Jacob Wilcox to develop resources for administrative staff at a local elementary school to encourage more culturally-responsive interactions with Spanish-speaking families of students enrolled at the school (see several examples here). Molly demonstrates strengths in cultural humility, drawing on past experiences to continually learn and apply this learning to her behavior, while also encouraging others along the way. This attitude toward the importance of ongoing learning is at least as important as her Spanish language skills, which are functionally strong.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Althea Gibson: "No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you." This quote has resonated with me in how it highlights the importance of community and the need to work together, learn from one another, and uplift each other.  To recognize the community within the LDDL team, we will be posting individual features highlighting outstanding individuals who have contributed substantially to the team's shared goals. I am incredibly excited for this first post, which features an individual who has been integral to building the LDDL lab from the ground up, as she joined the team back when I started at UofSC in Fall 2018:  Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera.

The last update I wrote was in November 2019. It's not possible to  put in to words the experiences of the last year, but I do believe it is important to share some things that have happened. I have the opportunity to work with and learn from some straight rockstars. In gratitude:

• Massive shoutout to my UofSC colleagues this year - the women in my department (in particular, not exclusively) have been the most incredible support system for each other, from engaging in deep conversations about the need for racial reckoning and social justice to talking through day-to-day problem-solving of being in a pandemic to finding joy in small things and sharing those with one another. I'm very grateful to be in a space with colleagues I genuinely enjoy not only working with, but sharing life with (as much as we can). 
  
• I can't say enough about the folks who work in my research lab (if you're recruiting for medical school or SLP doctoral programs, get in touch! The most amazing students work in my lab. I will have no trouble convincing you.) Nearly everyone stuck around and has adapted incredibly since shifting from full-speed in March 2020 to a complete halt in all live interaction with kids. We're slowly gearing up to start working with kids again virtually through Reach Every Reader, but we won't be back to working with anyone in person until at least fall 2021. And yet, folks have stuck around and deepened their contributions. Kaiela Campos and Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera are leading a really cool deep-dive into bilingual sentence repetition error analysis alongside Rose Luna - every time I talk with them, I get more excited about where they are going to go and the impact they will have (and that's not to mention their actual research, which is thoughtful and insightful - there's no way I could've come up with what they have dug into through this project). Molly Morgan and Manaal Ahmed have been collaborating with a fantastic group (including Daniela Becerra, Jacob Wilcox - a current Fulbright applicant, and Alvaro Verástegui... not to mention Marc Goodrich and  Sergio Leiva at University of Nebraska-Lincoln) to develop a culturally- and linguistically-responsive questionnaire that can be administered over the phone to U.S.-based Spanish-speaking families to gain a better understanding of family engagement in language- and literacy-supportive practices (which of course depends on the culture of the home! I cannot wait to write more about this work as we learn more). And Sarah Kate Coleman, who has persevered in adapting her senior undergraduate honors thesis to the times - she's examining how phonological variation occurs within sentence repetition tasks and how much that matters in dual language development... that's another project that will be a joy to share updates on as she moves forward on it. 
• Kimberly Briseño: currently part-time project coordinator for the SC site for Reach Every Reader (hopefully soon-to-be full-time!). Cannot say enough positive words about Kimberly - she is adaptive, quick-thinking, intentional, intelligent, and simply a delight to work with. We've struggled through a lot together this year (including sharing mutual sadness in saying goodbye to Mia Hruska as she moved on to her masters studies in speech-language pathology) and Kimberly has shown so much resilience. We are beyond fortunate to have connected and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue working with her into 2021!
• External to UofSC, there are more positive words than I could ever say for the folks I've had the privilege to learn from and start getting to know - I'm nervous because I will not explicitly shout out all folks who deserve recognition, but I don't want that to be an excuse to not name amazing people (in no particular order) because they are going above and beyond and have more than earned credit for space: Anny Castilla-Earls (100% helped me get it in gear to revise my dissertation for publication... which then got rejected... which I now will get back under review... and now we are working on a very cool analysis of a questionnaire she created for kids!!), Lakeisha Johnson (her self-described passion project Maya's Book Nook - on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook! - is an incredible resource for the educational community as a whole and the definition of engaged scholarship. I've benefitted greatly from her insight, intelligence, and compassion this year, both through a manuscript she helped me revise and prepare for resubmission after several rounds of rejection and through the Reach Every Reader project, where she has contributed substantially to thinking about testing for kids who speak nonmainstream dialects, most particularly African American English - I am very excited to see where her work leads us!), Rihana Mason (brilliant scholar and leader - I had the opportunity to contribute to a publication lead by Dr. Mason in 2020 that sharply addressed some of the disparities present in educational testing and that scratched the surface of what we might be able to do as educators to better support all children), Nicole Patton-Terry (now-FCRR director!! Dr. Patton-Terry's research is exceptional, but her work beyond that - in mentoring, in conversing, in engaging with the community - is beyond words. Just take a listen to her podcast conversation with Tiffany Hogan on SeeHearSpeak)... and  this isn't even to mention the leadership of PIs Yaacov Petscher and Hugh Catts, two mentors who I continue to learn from every time we interact. I hope I can work toward the level of inquisitiveness and effort for excellence that they pursue daily. Also, Leah Fabiano-Smith (agreed to serve as Second Reader for Sarah Kate's honors thesis committee - she has contributed hugely, and does this entirely as a service to the profession) and Arielle Borovsky (sponsored my efforts in pursuing an F31 NIH application during my doctoral degree, not to mention her support of me in learning about eye-tracking research for my dissertation). These are some amazing folks. They go above and beyond daily. 
• Also, a few Academia-relevant podcasts I've really enjoyed this pandemic: AcaDames (rec from Suzanne Adlof), Within & Between, and  Quantitude.
• My therapist also. Everyone should have the opportunity to work with a therapist (personally, I support universal physical and mental health coverage. This is not our current reality). I was fortunate to connect with an incredible therapist during 2020 and can't recommend therapy enough - in whatever form works. Massive props to my therapist. 

I want to point to Maya Angelou's wise statement "in diversity there is beauty and there is strength"... and perhaps at least as importantly the first part of that statement "it is time for parents to teach young people early on...", recognizing that for many children the title of parent can belong to many different people, potentially not including biological parents. We all benefit from the existence of differences. Each of us have different strengths, weaknesses, skills, preferences... when we combine these we find deep beauty. It's tragic that we (including myself) fail to realize this reality so often. Looking forward to participating in and witnessing this change as we move forward as a human race. 

Another quote that has resonated with me deeply is from Althea Gibson (if you haven't had the privilege of learning about her, I highly recommend a quick online search - she is the definition of a badass): "No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you." We do nothing alone. This is not to de-value any individual human, but rather to recognize collective value, acknowledging that each of us rely on others. For some of us (especially those of us with white skin), gaining help from others comes easier. For others, finding help is harder for a myriad of reasons. It's simply unreasonable to take sole credit for where we are - yes, we may have worked hard to get to the point that we are at, but that may be just as true for the person next to you as it is for the person packing burgers for you (I worked as a Krystal Burger line cook for a summer right before starting graduate school at Florida State - I had the best co-workers in the world and learned so much from every single one of them). I think that Althea's perspective on accomplishment is incredibly helpful to hold onto. It reminds us to be thankful to those who have supported and who continue to support us, and to pay that forward in building others up. It's amazing what we can do with help from others (cue The Beatles "I get by with a little help from my friends...").

Lots of learning, growing, and moving this fall! It's been an incredible (incredibly full!) semester during which I've found myself feeling increasingly grateful for the students who work in my lab. I had the opportunity at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association 2019 Convention (in Orlando) to talk with friends and colleagues about their experiences with their own research assistants. From what I've heard, our team is truly extraordinary. I already had a decent idea that that was the case, but it's become even more evident the more people I talk with!

If you want to learn more about our awesome team, check out the page highlighting them. They've done a few really cool projects this fall and we're lined up for even more in 2020!
If you're interested in joining the team, check out our current projects and opportunities for students here. 

Highlights from Fall:
1. The Reach Every Reader Assessment project is officially up and running! It's been a challenge to get started, but I am very excited and grateful to be a part of this work in a different way than I was during my postdoc. This multi-university project (we're under the Florida Center for Reading Research branch, but there's also Harvard and MIT) is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the overall goal is to improve reading in the United States! My nine-person team is focused on piloting the reading assessment I helped develop during my postdoc. We've tested over 100 kids this fall at 5 schools and are working to get to our goal of 300 students by the end of the year. Fun stuff. 
2. We receive an ASHFoundation grant for 2020! Our project titled "Assessment of Spanish-English Speakers’ Language and Literacy Development" was funded through the New Investigators mechanism. This $10,000 grant will run from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 to fund research being conducted by our lab here in South Carolina and by my co-investigator, Marc Goodrich out in Nebraska. We'll be evaluating the early language and emergent reading skills of Spanish-English speaking dual language learners in kindergarten and Grade 1 to help us determine what assessment approaches best predict children's English reading development. This project is part of a partnership with Lexington 2 School District and specifically Riverbank Elementary. We are so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with such wonderful people - teachers, speech-language pathologists, administration, parents, and the kids! It's a beautiful blend of clinical work and research. Couldn't ask for a more amazing group of people to work with. 
3. Personally, I'm very excited for a few smaller things this fall:

•  Autumn McIlraith (friend and fantastic colleague) and I had the opportunity to give a two-hour seminar at ASHA this year focused on dichotomization of continuous variables (bad! If you want to know more, email me and I'll send you our slides and/or talk with you about it!) and alternative approaches when dichotomization seems like the only choice. We had a decent turnout with wonderful attendees and discussion!
• I submitted my dissertation manuscript for publication (finally! Thank you to Anny Castilla-Earls for pushing me on that!)
• A manuscript that's been rejected at least five times at last count (nearly all because the journals didn't think the paper was a good fit) finally got a revise and resubmit! Looking forward to eventually seeing what I think is a very good paper in print. 
• My students keep making cool infographics, like the one below. I should highlight those more often - they're a great resource!

This summer has been FULL of learning experiences and I'm guessing that there are plenty more to come.  But for now, here are a few key points from this summer:

1. Two-Stage Screening. Why don't we do this with all universal screening? The big argument FOR universal screening is that we're missing way too many kids who have speech, language, and/or reading problems in schools. They fall through the cracks until it's "too late" (it's never too late, but remediation is more difficult as kids get older). Opponents, however, point out that universal screening is a huge time investment that isn't reasonable in most schools - you can't screen for everything and it results in a bunch of kids being over-identified. Over-identification is bad because it takes time and resources away from the kids and service providers who really need them. 

• Potential solution = use a high-sensitivity screener with everyone that takes next-to-no-time. It could even be a parent/teacher report measure. The key is that you want to kick out as many high-achieving kids as possible. This gives you a higher prevalence rate for whatever you're trying to identify in the second sample... allowing you to use a second-stage screener that takes slightly more time but that really lets you tease apart the typically-developing kids from the ones who need more support. This can save time, money, and reduce the number of kids we're missing. 
• Unfortunately... our screeners aren't currently optimized to function in this framework. We need to work on that. Maybe there are some grant ideas within that...

2. I love Twitter. Recently, I ran across a Twitter conversation between some colleagues talking about how hard it is to get nicely-printed output from descriptives by group in R (at least compared to other programs, including Excel and SPSS). Conveniently, one of them shared some great code for easy, pretty-looking descriptives by group that can be shared with coauthors. One of these days I'll do an example and share it but for now here's a link to that thread.  Credit to Ashley Edwards for the R Code! Also - check out her github account for this and more resources!

ALSO - because of this Twitter conversation, I was referred to this awesome thread as well. Dave Braze on making pretty tables here. 

3. There are a lot of people out there who have way more knowledge and experience than me in conducting educational research. Many of them are more than happy to help the rest of us when we get stuck (me all the time). The challenge is really in connecting those people - the ones who want to be helpful to the ones who need the help. Twitter helps with this somewhat. There are also other options out there like the Meta-Analysis Training Institute (PI = Terri Pigott. Team includes Tasha Beretvas, Beth Tipton, Josh Polanin, and Ryan Williams), which can connect interested researchers with each other. Obviously also having amazing colleagues also helps, but that's not the case for everyone. I'm interested in figuring out more ways that we can connect people - everyone has unique strengths (and needs) and there is SO much work to be done that it seems silly not to work together. 

I've been at the University of South Carolina in the Communication Sciences & Disorders department for about 10 months now. It's been a good year made better by amazing colleagues and great students. Columbia also has turned out to be an incredible place to do educational research, especially focusing on children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds!

I've been fortunate in that it's been easy to stay connected with friends from Florida State (many of whom have now moved elsewhere) as we've been wrapping up some papers, including one that focused on the sentence repetition task of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (Pena et al., 2014). Check out the citation and link to full paper at the bottom of this post. 

I wanted to share some resources pulled together by my academic sister Dr. Autumn McIlraith (currently at the University of Houston, previously my office mate). We were both part of the last PIRT cohort at Florida State - our first three years at FSU were funded by an interdisciplinary training grant supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (more info about that here). During our PIRT experience, the importance of methodology, appropriate statistics, and construct validity was instilled in us thanks to Drs. Chris Lonigan and Chris Schatschneider. We both have since made methodology and statistics a focal component of our work and are constantly thinking of different ways to share this focus with our colleagues and fellow CSD researchers. We've talked about methods and statistics at the last few ASHA conventions (listed here) and Autumn has compiled a list of some of her favorite resources since she started working at the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics under Dr. David Francis's mentorship. Her long list of helpful links includes general introductory resources, information about power, effect sizes, and linear modeling, resources to get started in R statistical software, teaching resources, and data visualization information. Highly recommend checking those out when you have time. Also - if you have any favorite resources that you think belong on the list, please let us know! We are always seeking out new resources and know that there are plenty of things out there designed to make applied researchers' lives easier. 

​Fitton, L., Hoge, R., Petscher, Y., & Wood, C. (2019). Psychometric evaluation of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment Sentence Repetition task for clinical decision-making. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-18-0354

• View the final, accepted version of the manuscript here. Abstract below.

Abstract: 
Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish–English speaking children's sentence repetition and vocabulary performance.
Method: Participants were 291 Spanish–English speaking children in kindergarten and 1st grade. Item analyses were used to evaluate the underlying factor structure for each language version of the sentence repetition tasks of the BESA. The tasks were then examined in relation to a measure of English receptive vocabulary.
Results: Bifactor models, which include a single underlying general factor and multiple specific factors, provided the best overall model fit for both the Spanish and English versions of the task. There was no relation between children's overall Spanish sentence repetition performance and their English vocabulary. However, children's pronoun, noun phrase, and verb phrase item scores in Spanish significantly predicted their English vocabulary scores. For English sentence repetition, both children's overall performance and their specific performance on the noun phrase items were predictors of their English vocabulary scores. Follow-up analyses revealed that, for the purposes of clinical assessment, the BESA sentence repetition tasks can be considered essentially unidimensional, lending support to the current scoring structure of the test.
Conclusions: Study findings suggest that sentence repetition tasks can provide insight into Spanish–English speaking children's vocabulary skills in addition to their morphosyntactic skills when used on a broad research scale. From a clinical assessment perspective, results indicate that the sentence repetition task has strong internal validity and support to the use of this measure in clinical practice.

This summer I've spent some time learning more about options for open access both through educational research journals and university programs. It still seems to me that providing access to research articles is more difficult than it should be. However, there are some great resources and options out there to make research more widely accessible. This is incredibly important in my opinion - if our research isn't accessible to the people who could benefit from it, then what's the point of doing research at all? 

Along those lines, here are two recent publications that are available. AERA provided a toll-free hyperlink to make a recent meta-analysis (co-authored with Autumn McIlraith and Carla Wood) more widely accessible. It's wonderful that journals like the Review of Educational Research are making efforts to provide options like this:

Fitton, L., McIlraith, A. L., & Wood, C. L. (2018).  Shared book reading interventions with English learners: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research. doi: 10.3102/0034654318790909
Toll-free link to article. The final, definitive version is available at http://rer.aera.net.
Copyright © 2018 by American Educational Research Association

The second paper is published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and is open-access as an IES-funded project:
Wood, C., Fitton, L., Petscher, Y., Rodriguez, E., Sunderman, G., & Lim, T. (2018). The effect of e-book vocabulary instruction on Spanish-English speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0368