Florina Erbeli

Texas A&M University | TAMU · Department of Educational Psychology

Reading and math attainment develop during elementary grades. Questions remain, though, about the co-developmental nature of the relation between reading and math. This study examined dynamic, longitudinal pathways between reading and math in first through fourth grades. Participants of the study were 554 academically at-risk children (Mage at the...

Dyslexia, a specific reading disability, is a common (up to 10% of children) and highly heritable (~70%) neurodevelopmental disorder. Behavioral and molecular genetic approaches are aimed towards dissecting its significant genetic component. In the proposed review, we will summarize advances in twin and molecular genetic research from the past 20 y...

The National Reading Panel identified phonemic awareness (PA) as one of the five components of reading and found explicit instruction effective in developing PA skills in students. In the current meta-analysis, we explored the extent to which PA instruction was effective for developing PA skills in preschool through first grade students and examine...

Purpose Researchers have developed a constellation model of decoding-related reading disabilities (RD) to improve the RD risk determination. The model’s hallmark is its inclusion of various RD indicators to determine RD risk. Classification methods such as logistic regression (LR) might be one way to determine RD risk within the constellation model...

Purpose: Research on how much early phonemic awareness (PA) instruction is optimal has produced inconclusive answers. We conducted a nonlinear meta-analysis to estimate the optimal cumulative dosage of early PA instruction on PA outcomes with an associated maximum effect size in preschool through first-grade students. Method: Sixteen experimental a...

https://researchfeatures.com/teaching-early-phonemic-awareness/

In the United States, approximately 67% of fourth graders are reading below grade level. Many of the students who are reading below grade level are being serviced through special education or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act for reading-related disabilities. Dyslexia is the most commonly identified specific learning disability. With these stat...

This poster presentation provides a review of interventions and classroom strategies used with dysgraphic students. Strategies for addressing handwriting difficulties generally fall into two categories, direct and indirect services. Direct services includes activities working directly with the student, while indirect services includes working with...

INTRODUCTION • The prevalence of specific learning disabilities (SLD) is the highest among all disabilities. An estimated 15% of school-aged children struggle with an SLD. • Accommodation and support services that align with the severity of SLD can significantly enhance an individual's overall functioning. Thus, research-based interventions are vit...

Background The way in which socioeconomic status (SES) moderates the etiology of reading attainment has been explored many times, with past work often finding that genetic influences are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic deprivation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a gene–SES interaction. Additionally,...

This study examined the heterogeneity in the co-developmental trajectories of reading and math performance (i. e., parallel changes in the initial scores and growth patterns) and identified the number, size and shape of the codevelopmental trajectory across elementary and middle schools. In addition, this investigation focused on how an early child...

Background: The effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the etiology of reading attainment has been explored many times, with past work often finding that genetic influences are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic deprivation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a gene-SES interaction. Additionally, past wor...

Universal screening in reading is a common, and often required, practice in early elementary school. Computer-adaptive screening tools, such as Istation’s Indicators of Progress–Early Reading (ISIP-ER), are often chosen for this purpose in schools. In our present study, we examine the validity evidence between the ISIP-ER in kindergarten and third...

This poster presentation provides an overview of state-level dysgraphia policy. We begin by defining dysgraphia and some common misconceptions. Results showed that the lack of research on dysgraphia is one contributing factor in the inconsistency of dysgraphia identification. Then, we describe the types of dysgraphia policy throughout the United St...

Computer adaptive screening tools are used in elementary schools to identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties. Istation’s Indicators of Progress-Early Reading (ISIP-ER) is a commonly used screener in Texas schools. This presentation addresses the validity and accuracy of Istation as a screener for English Language Learners. Scre...

This poster presentation presents findings from a narrative review, which summarizes the latest research on dysgraphia. Specifically, the poster presentation addresses the latest findings on dysgraphia identification, interventions for remediation, and inconsistencies in policy and procedures concerning dysgraphia across the United States. Due to t...

Phonemic awareness is a key building block for later reading and spelling development. Students at risk for reading difficulties may have difficulties with phonemic awareness and need additional instruction or intervention to develop these skills. This article discusses evidence-based phonemic awareness instruction and the implementation of supplem...

Advancing reading disabilities identification and risk prediction has been the focus of reading disabilities research for over three decades. Despite considerable research effort, approaches to identification and classification that primarily rely on a single factor have not proved to have sufficient reliability (Schatschneider et al., 2016). No si...

Latent profile analysis is a widely used approach to identify subgroups of students at risk for reading difficulties. However, evidence from reading research involving middle schoolers challenges the utility and meaning of these putatively categorically distinct reading profiles, which can be statistically derived even in the absence of real profil...

Background: Research on academic development has mainly focused on early time periods with less attention on individual differences in development in the later school years. Methods: To improve our knowledge of how students develop academically during later school years, this study used a multivariate growth model to investigate the developmental t...

Behavioral research supports the efficacy of intervention for reading disability, but the brain mechanisms underlying improvement in reading are not well understood. Here, we review 39 neuroimaging studies of reading intervention to characterize links between reading improvement and changes in the brain. We report evidence of changes in activation,...

Encouraging children to read extensively has been a widely recommended approach to developing reading. The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) published a review study reporting inconclusive findings regarding the benefits of such an approach. In this systematic narrative synthesis review, we provided an update and an extension of the NRP’s review....

Research on the question of creative benefit accompanying dyslexia has produced conflicting findings. In this meta-analysis we determined summary effects of mean and variance differences in creativity between groups with and without dyslexia. Twenty studies were included (n = 770 individuals with dyslexia, n = 1,671 controls). A random-effects robu...

An estimated 700 million people learn how to read in English as a foreign language (EFL). This highlights the need to better understand the components influencing EFL reading. We tested to what degree EFL decoding and linguistic comprehension influenced EFL reading comprehension within the realm of three variants of the Simple View of Reading (SVR)...

Reading competence is one of the main gateways to learning and serves as the foundation for nearly all academic subjects, but reading is not a natural skill. For beginning and struggling readers, the process of learning to read is often fraught with frustration. Thus, abilities to manage affect or emotions and maintain attention or focus (i.e., emo...

According to the Multiple Deficit Model, comorbidity results when the genetic and environmental risk factors that increase the liability for a disorder are domain-general. In order to explore the role of domain-general etiological risk factors in the co-occurrence of learning-related difficulties, the current meta-analysis compiled 38 studies of th...

Purpose: Meta-analytic methods allow not only for a robust estimate of an effect, but also can be used to answer novel research questions themselves, via moderator analysis. Meta-analysis techniques have been used to explore research questions across twin studies of reading ability. Despite fairly consistent results across twin projects, interestin...

Background Reading is important for children's success in school and beyond, yet many adolescents fail to reach expected levels of proficiency. This highlights the need to better understand the factors that influence reading effectiveness over time, including genes and environment. Greater expression of genetic influence on first‐ and second‐grade...

The Cholesky decomposition method is the gold standard used in the field of behavioral genetics. The method is popular because it is easy to program and solve. Using this method, researchers can explore individual differences in longitudinal relations of different variables across multiple timepoints. The method allows investigators to decompose va...

The purpose of this study was to test the directionality of influence between reading comprehension and print exposure, thereby estimating genetic and environmental effects of this relation. The sample consisted of 910 twins in fourth through ninth grades (M age = 12.33 years, SD = 1.41) from the Florida Twin Project on Reading, Behavior, and Envir...

Given a shift in the role of genetics in the context of special education, this commentary outlines advances in our understanding of genetic influences on learning disabilities. In particular, it focuses on advances that have implications for instruction and interventions conducted by special educators, and calls for broadening of the scope of prof...

A risk to develop a learning disability has been shown to run in families. Having a positive family history of learning disability seems to account for mean differences in achievement outcomes (reading, math) in that children with a positive family history score significantly lower compared to their peers with no such family history. However, the r...

This study investigated the etiology of longitudinal relations among kindergarten prereading skills, first-grade word level reading skills, and seventh-grade reading comprehension in 265 monozygotic and 459 dizygotic twin pairs (Mage = 6.29 years in kindergarten) from the Florida Twin Project on Reading. Using a quadvariate Cholesky decomposition,...

A fairly recent definition of reading disability (RD) is that in the form of a hybrid model. The model views RD as a latent construct that is manifested through various observable unexpected impairments in reading related skills and through inadequate response to intervention. The current report evaluated this new conceptualization of RD from an et...

Purpose: In 2012 an influential publication used spatial analysis in the UK twin project TEDS to visualize the genetic and environmental influences on various childhood phenotypes based on geographical location (Davis et al., 2012). Also, a growing body of literature indicates that socioeconomic status moderates the genetic influences on academic a...

This study examined the difference between less-skilled and skilled L1 Slovene English as foreign language (EFL) students in foreign language (L2) fluency and L2 orthographic skills; 93 less-skilled Grade 7 L1 Slovene students and 102 skilled Grade 7 L1 Slovene students participated in the study. The results showed that skilled readers performed be...