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

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

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ended prompts, <strong>or</strong> statements encouraging children to discuss the st<strong>or</strong>y; Wh-prompts, <strong>or</strong><br />

questions asking ‗What?‘, ‗Where?‘, and ―Why?‘ about the st<strong>or</strong>y; and Distancing<br />

prompts, <strong>or</strong> questions encouraging children to relate st<strong>or</strong>ybook content to their own lives.<br />

A second acronym, PEER, was provided to remind teachers and parents <strong>of</strong> these five<br />

types <strong>of</strong> questions: Prompting children to discuss the st<strong>or</strong>y, Evaluating children‘s<br />

responses, Expanding children‘s prompts through additional inf<strong>or</strong>mation and repetition,<br />

and encouraging children to Repeat their own elab<strong>or</strong>ated responses to questions regarding<br />

st<strong>or</strong>ybook content.<br />

Children participated in dialogic reading f<strong>or</strong> approximately 7 months and the<br />

intervention program focused on phonemic awareness and relations between phonemes<br />

and letters f<strong>or</strong> approximately 4 months. A principal components analysis including items<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Expressive One W<strong>or</strong>d Picture Vocabulary<br />

Test, the expressive subscale <strong>of</strong> the Illinois Test <strong>of</strong> Psycholinguistic Abilities, and 18<br />

Developing Skills Checklist (DSC) subscales revealed four fact<strong>or</strong>s: language, writing,<br />

linguistic awareness, and print concepts. Results revealed that children in the intervention<br />

group outperf<strong>or</strong>med children in the control group on nearly every subtest. Statistically<br />

significant, medium effect sizes were found f<strong>or</strong> children‘s writing skills (Cohen‘s d = .52)<br />

and print concepts knowledge (Cohen‘s d = .62) at post-test. Intervention effects on<br />

children‘s language skills and linguistic awareness, however, did not reach statistical<br />

significance. Whitehurst et al. (1994) attributed this lack <strong>of</strong> statistical significance to less<br />

frequent uses <strong>of</strong> advanced dialogic reading techniques (e.g., using distancing prompts and<br />

open-ended questions) by teachers in the intervention condition. Also, variability in<br />

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