KU News Release

LAWRENCE — Three University of Kansas researchers and a KU alumnus are part of a monumental $120 million multi-university undertaking to overhaul how reading is taught to U.S. children by 2015.

The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

Hugh Catts, chair of KU’s highly ranked speech-language-hearing department; Diane Nielsen, professor of education; Mindy Bridges, research associate; and Tiffany Hogan, a speech-language-hearing alumna, now assistant professor of special education and communication disorders at the University of Nebraska, are collaborating on one of the six $20 million projects, called The Language Bases of Reading Comprehension. The project is a consortium between researchers at KU, Ohio State University, University of Nebraska, Arizona State University and Lancaster University in England.

Likened to a NASA space mission by Education Week, the Reading for Understanding initiative accelerates the research process through the simultaneous funding of several related projects and a network of 160 researchers.

“Our national reading crisis persists despite many attempts to mitigate it,” said Catts. “U.S. students continue to lag behind those from many countries, including Hungary and Bulgaria, in their ability to understand what they read.”

Much of the nation’s research agenda has been focused on improving word-reading skills, but it did not translate into higher reading comprehension test scores, Catts said.

“Reading comprehension is an active process in which the reader uses his or her language knowledge, background knowledge and reasoning skills to construct an understanding of the text,” Catts said. “That is, how you think with a book in your hand.”

Following a translational model of community and practitioner participation in research, partner schools’ representatives will be members of research teams to help with the development and implementation of instructional packages. One of the school partners for the project is Lee’s Summit (Mo.) R-7 School District.

“Reading for Understanding is an attempt to dramatically increase our knowledge about what is involved in skilled reading comprehension and how this may be taught in the classroom,” Catts said.