Cornerstones Literacy
Detailed Overview
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Cornerstones is a technology-infused approach to literacy development for early elementary children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Academic experts in literacy and deafness, along with teachers of deaf students helped us develop an instructional approach that is demanding, engaging, research-based, and flexible for use with children who have a range of backgrounds, communication needs, and skills.
We are most concerned with three key areas of literacy:
- Identification of words in print
- In-depth knowledge of words, and
- Story comprehension
An essential element of Cornerstones is a story taken from PBS's literacy series Between the Lions, complemented by versions of the story in American Sign Language and other visual-spatial systems for communicating with deaf children, such as Signing Exact English and cued speech. Other materials include a hypertext version of the story, an electronic storybook where children can click on a word to see a picture, example, or other meaning; clip art of target words; and supplementary games and activities. A teachers guide includes a day-by-day sequence of rigorous learning objectives and lessons, with recommended instructional practices.
The Cornerstones Project developed a sample teaching unit for teachers to try out in their classrooms. We refined this sample unit; the resulting prototype Cornerstones unit is now available.
We conducted field tests and a pilot evaluation in 2000 (Phase 1). A more rigorous evaluation will take place in 2002 and 2003 (Phase 2).
Phase 1: Field Test and Evaluation
Eight teachers in six classrooms field-tested one Cornerstones unit with 32 deaf and hard-of-hearing elementary school children. Project staff conducted preliminary assessments of word recognition, word knowledge, and comprehension. Children learned a significant number of words — twice as many as their teachers said they taught in a typical literature unit. The younger children (ages 6-9), who could recognize an average of eight words on the pretest, learned an average of 13 new words, while the older children (ages 10-12), who recognized an average of 20 words on the pretest, also made significant gains. In addition, students demonstrated an increase in their knowledge of selected words from pre-test to post-test.
Project staff observed and videotaped classroom lessons, and teachers evaluated Cornerstones via daily journals and post-field test interviews. The teachers were overwhelmingly positive about using the unit, and incorporated elements of Cornerstones into their teaching repertoires. In their judgment, Cornerstones is effective for improving literacy skills and is feasible as a supplement to their language arts curricula.
Phase 2: Rigorous Evaluation of Effectiveness
Cornerstones Phase 2 will evaluate in a more rigorous way the effectiveness of the Cornerstones Approach to improve literacy of deaf and hard-of-hearing children, and evaluate the feasibility and value of Cornerstones technology and materials in the classroom. We will also explore the potential value of Cornerstones to improve home-school connections.
We were encouraged by the preliminary findings of Phase 1 and utilized these findings to refine the Cornerstones approach and to design a research study that focuses on the effectiveness and feasibility of the approach within a more rigorous scientific paradigm and the constraints of using intact classrooms.
During Phase 2, the merits of the Cornerstones approach will be compared to the relative merits of typical literacy practices for the same group of students. Throughout a total of three experiments, a Cornerstones intervention will be compared to a typical intervention, which will serve as the control variable.
We hypothesize that there will be greater improvement associated with the use of the Cornerstones intervention as compared to the typical intervention in the three areas we are targetting (identification of words in print, in-depth knowledge of words, and story comprehension).
We also expect that teachers will find the Cornerstones approach both feasible and worthwhile. These findings will be supported, in part, by the existence of carry-over effects from the Cornerstones intervention to a subsequent typical intervention.
