Sample A: Cover Page of Thesis, Project, or Dissertation Proposal

Effects of Intervention Implementation
Intervention Effects on Emergent Literacy Skills, Emotion Knowledge, and Social Skills
Regression-based analyses were employed in order to assess effects of
intervention implementation. Findings did not support intervention effectiveness for
enhancing children‘s emergent literacy skills, emotion knowledge, or social skills. Three
possible explanations may account for this lack of findings. First, it may be that the use of
dialogic reading techniques while reading emotion-laden storybooks, that is, the
questions added to individual storybook pages in the books provided to teachers assigned
to the intervention group, was ineffective in enhancing children‘s emergent literacy skills,
emotion knowledge, and social skills. Although research methods were theoretically
(Denham & Auerbach, 1995; Garner et al., 1997; Gottman et al., 1997) and empirically
supported (Whitehurst et al., 1994, 1999; Zevenbergen et al., 2003), this study was unlike
previous research in that no previous intervention has merged dialogic reading techniques
with social-emotional content (J. Fischel, personal communication, September 27, 2007;
G. Whitehurst, personal communication, May 1, 2007; A. Zevenbergen, personal
communication, October 1, 2007). The specific research methods employed may have
simply missed the mark.
Alternatively, the within- and between-classroom variability with which
intervention methods were implemented may have contributed to the ineffectiveness of
intervention methods in enhancing children emergent literacy skills, emotion knowledge,
and social skills. Intervention methods were implemented with variability both within and
between classrooms. Because participating classrooms operated on both full- and half-
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