Two members of the Neag School of Education faculty have been awarded federal grants totaling more than $6 million to expand their research into improving educational outcomes for students.

Sandra Chafouleas, a professor in the school psychology program and a research scientist at the Neag Center for Behavioral Education and Research (CBER), has received a $2.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) for continuing work on Direct Behavior Rating, which she co-created with an earlier IES grant.

Michael Coyne, an associate professor of educational psychology and special education, program coordinator of Special Education, and also a research scientist at the Center for Behavioral Education and Research, was awarded a $4 million IES grant to continue his research into improving student language and literacy by providing a comprehensive system of Early Vocabulary Instruction and Intervention.

Chafouleas’s research team has focused on using Direct Behavior Rating to measure respectful, non-disruptive, and academically engaged behaviors that have been deemed important to the process of allowing all students to be in the classroom and ready to access instruction.

Although the tool has long been used for intervention and communication purposes, the Direct Behavior Rating scales will continue to be studied in this new round of research as a method of assessing student behaviors. “This grant allows for large-scale evaluation as to how DBR can be used to identify students at risk and progress-monitor their response to behavior supports,” says Chafouleas.

In the new grant, Chafouleas is part of a research team that includes Neag School faculty members Megan Welsh and Hariharan Swaminathan, as well as colleagues Chris Riley-Tillman from the University of Missouri and Greg Fabiano of the University at Buffalo.

The research will take place in elementary and middle schools in Connecticut, New York, and Missouri, and will involve approximately 2,000 students and teachers.

This grant is the largest the team has received to date in what has become a very competitive environment. Only five proposals at a time are accepted in this category, and Chafouleas’s was one of them.

Coyne’s Early Vocabulary Intervention targets the “achievement gap” that persists among students in language and vocabulary development. Coyne’s research team is focused on the ‘vocabulary gap’ that is present at the beginning of kindergarten and continues to grow larger in the early grades. “Early intervention can help at-risk students make meaningful gains in their vocabulary knowledge and, by extension, in their reading comprehension,” he says.

The project will work with more than 1,500 kindergarten students and teachers in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Oregon to implement high-quality classroom vocabulary instruction for all students, as well as supplemental small-group intervention for those students most at risk. The intervention reinforces vocabulary introduced in whole-class activities by providing more explicit, scaffolded, and interactive instruction, coupled with immediate corrective feedback.

This multi-tiered approach is preventative rather than reactive. “Schools currently have access to very few evidence-based practices and strategies for targeting and narrowing the vocabulary gap,” Coyne says. “With this IES grant, we will be able to provide schools and teachers with the materials, resources, and supports they need to maximize student outcomes.” The grant, the largest Coyne’s team has received to date, was one of only three awarded in its category.

IES is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education with a budget of more than $200 million. Its aim is to improve educational outcomes for all students, especially those at risk of failure. The IES carries out its work through four Centers: the National Center for Education Research, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, and the National Center for Special Education Research, which awarded the grants to both Chafouleas and Coyne.