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

statistically significant mean differences between the intervention and book reading
control groups in children‘s emergent literacy skills, emotion knowledge, and social
skills. These outcomes suggest differences between experimental groups‘ emergent
literacy and social-emotional skills detectable when examining group means in children‘s
outcomes but not when attempting to predict intervention effects on children‘s outcomes,
likely due to a fundamental difference between ANOVA- versus regression-based
analytic approaches: Whereas ANOVA-based analyses ignored the magnitude of
differences among the categorical independent variables classroom and experimental
group assignment, regression-based analyses utilized this information by including effect
codes allowing an examination of each experimental group mean to the mean of the total
sample (see Cohen et al., 2003; Kirk, 1995).
These statistically significant mean differences and the fact that 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)
warrant the potential value of future research investigating altered intervention methods.
Empirically supported intervention methods merging dialogic reading techniques with
social-emotional content, a feat not yet accomplished to date (J. Fischel, personal
communication, September 27, 2007; G. Whitehurst, personal communication, May 1,
2007; A. Zevenbergen, personal communication, October 1, 2007), could prove valuable
for achieving goals similar to those of the Woven Word program (Committee for
Children, 2006) and the 4Rs (Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility,
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