Parents Plus Awarded New Grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) directed funding towards research on interventions designed to ameliorate the impact of disruptions in education on child development. The Parents Plus projectm led by Dr. Brook Sawyer (PI) and Dr. Carol Scheffner Hammer (Co-PI), was one of the recipients of this IES COVID grant. Parents Plus is a training program designed for parents of preschoolers (ages 3-5) with language impairments. This intervention aims to help parents implement language facilitation strategies with their child in the home and improve child language outcomes. The online program includes an app-based training on Focused Stimulation, an evidence-based language facilitation strategy (Girolametto et al., 1995, 1996), and remote coaching from a certified speech language pathologist. The three-year study, which began in September 2022, will refine the intervention content and delivery, examine intervention effects on child language development, and examine the cost-effectiveness of the program. This project marks the fourth study and fifth year of collaboration between Dr. Sawyer’s lab at Lehigh University and Dr. Hammer’s DLL Lab at Teachers College Columbia University. To learn more about the development of Parents Plus, please refer to the article below.

Sawyer, B.E., Hammer, C.S., Santoro, J.K., Smith, J.S., & Feil, E.G. (2022). Developing Parents Plus: A parent-implemented intervention for young children with language disorders. Infants and Young Children, 35(3), 205-221. https://doi.org/10.1097/IYC.0000000000000219