2.4 Doctoral program issues: commentary on companion dissertations  (Page 6/14)

McArthur (2003) reported her abstract in her dissertation in the following manner.

Purpose. The purpose of this exploratory study was to evaluate whether a highly focused Spanish early literacy intervention increased pre-reading skills for sixteen culturally and linguistically diverse bilingual kindergarten students who were identified as most at risk for reading difficulties at the focus school. Two research questions were used to guide the empirical efforts of the study: (a) How effective was the intervention for improving student reading scores in each of the 12 instructional reading components addressed in the intervention? and (b) How effective was the intervention for each of the sixteen kindergarten bilingual students in the focus school's at risk population?

Design. A one-group pretest-posttest design was used to provide the empirical evidence needed to answer both research questions. The independent variable was the set of twelve unique reading intervention strategies that were developed for each of the twelve components measured by the Tejas LEE (TL), the common measure used in the pretest and posttest.

Results. For research question one, the Spanish early literacy intervention was determined to be effective for seven of the twelve TL literacy components addressed in the intervention.

For research question two, this Spanish early literacy intervention was determined to be "Highly Effective" or "Effective" for eight kindergarten students, "Partially Effective" for an additional five students and "Ineffective" for the remaining three kindergarten students.

Recommendations. Three recommendations were presented for continuing the research agenda addressed in this study. The initial recommendation suggested a need for researchers to reexamine the validity of the First Letter Omission measure used in the kindergarten TL. The other two recommendations indicate how and why practitioners should replicate this study for other at risk bilingual kindergarten students. (p.iii-iv)

Mohr’s dissertation abstract is clearly similar to McArthur’s as it should be in a companion dissertation; however, differences are also clear in the abstract. Mohr’s abstract follows.

Purpose. The intent of this inquiry was to determine the extent to which a highly focused Spanish early literacy intervention increased pre-reading skills for 13 culturally and linguistically diverse bilingual first grade students who were identified in their school as most at risk for reading difficulties. Two research questions were used to structure the empirical efforts of this inquiry:(a) How effective was the intervention for improving student reading scores in each of the 17 instructional reading components addressed in the intervention? and (b) How effective was the intervention for each of the 13 first grade bilingual students designated as the at risk population?

Design. A single-group pretest-posttest design was used to generate the empirical evidence needed to answer these two research questions. The independent variable was the set of 17 unique reading intervention strategies that were developed for each of the 17 components measured in the first grade version of the Tejas LEE (TL), the common measure used in the pretest and the posttest.