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Using the MULTILIT literacy instruction program with children who have Down syndrome

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Abstract

We evaluated the MULTILIT—“Making Up Lost Time in Literacy”—instruction program for individuals with Down syndrome. The 12-week program was administered on a 1:1 basis to participants who were assessed at three timepoints: Baseline, pre-instruction, and post-instruction. Participants were allocated non-randomly to two groups that had comparable abilities prior to intervention. These groups differed in the duration of the control period between baseline and pre-instruction: 12 weeks for Group 1 (n = 8, mean age = 168.88 months) and 24 weeks for Group 2 (n = 7, mean age = 164.71 months). Improvements in literacy skills were evaluated within participants (each participant serving as her/his own control), and the influence of control periods was evaluated between participants. Phonological awareness, word reading accuracy, and word spelling accuracy all improved significantly from pre- to post-instruction, with large effect sizes; whereas no statistically significant changes were observed during the control period (between baseline and pre-instruction assessments) regardless of the duration of this control period.

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Acknowledgements

Lisa Lim was supported by an Australian Government APA Award. Joanne Arciuli was partly supported by a mid career research Future Fellowship granted by the Australian Research Council. Lisa Lim completed this research as a Ph.D. student under primary supervision of Joanne Arciuli. We would like to thank all the children and their families who participated in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Lisa Lim, Joanne Arciuli & Natalie Munro

  2. Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Linda Cupples

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  1. Lisa Lim
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  2. Joanne Arciuli
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  3. Natalie Munro
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  4. Linda Cupples
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Correspondence to Joanne Arciuli.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Participants’ ages and raw scores at each time period for PA, word reading, and spelling measures
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Lim, L., Arciuli, J., Munro, N. et al. Using the MULTILIT literacy instruction program with children who have Down syndrome. Read Writ 32, 2179–2200 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09945-8

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