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

asis; and some classrooms included additional community members that volunteered on
a regularly scheduled basis. Participating children‘s family members also volunteered in
classrooms periodically.
Participants
Participants included teachers and children from 13 of 15 classrooms at the two
largest Rocky Mountain SER Head Start Program sites in Pueblo, Colorado. Two
classrooms, one in each of the two largest sites, were excluded from the study because
they included 3-year-old children only; thus, children participating in these classes did
not meet age criteria for inclusion in the research. Classrooms were assigned to either of
two experimental groups: the intervention group and the book reading control group.
Teachers
Thirty-one of the 32 teachers in the 13 participating classrooms agreed to
participate. One teacher, a teaching assistant in a full-day classroom at the second largest
site, declined participation. She primarily supported the lead and assistant teachers in that
classroom by setting tables prior to and cleaning up tables following breakfast, lunch, and
snack time, and also by preparing materials for group teaching activities (e.g., distributing
construction paper and stickers for art activity) and assisting children with the completion
of these activities. This teacher‘s first language was Spanish, and her second language
was English.
Twenty-seven of these teachers conducted storybook readings during the
implementation of intervention methods (as part of both the intervention and book
reading control groups), and 25 of these teachers agreed to be audiotaped during
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