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Do you live in the US and have multiples in elementary school? We are recruiting for NatPAT, a national (US) twin project on reading and math development! Fill out our survey to see if you are eligible https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5havBsIDyOpAzB3 The National Project on Achievement in Twins (NatPAT) is funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant number HD052120).
We are interested in understanding how reading and math skills develop together through elementary school. Twins allow us understand more about how these skills develop, namely the "nature and nurture" of the process. We are working together with the University of Oregon's DIBELS group to recruit twins from any school in the US that uses a DIBELS product. Enrollment is easy, it is a one page form that parents fill out, and this is all that the families have to do. We ask a school staff member to help us by simply handing out our recruitment package to the families of multiples in their school. The recruitment package is an envelope we can mail to the school, or through a link we can email. We already have permission from districts to do this work, as we will be using data already collected and sitting in a database at the University of Oregon. If you would like to see more about this permission, the paperwork is below. We also have IRB permission for this study through FSU (below). Interested to know more? Feel free to hit the "Email Us!" button to send an email to our staff, or you can call 1-877-708-9203. NatPAT is part of a larger group of projects through the Florida Learning Disabilities Research Center, funded by the NIH to the Florida Center for Reading Research. |
Technical Abstract of ProjectReading and math problems represent an important public health issue for children in that they are associated with various negative outcomes including school failure, limited occupational success, and juvenile delinquency (Geary et al., 2012; Reynolds et al., 2002). Of US fourth-grade students, one-fourth fail to reach even partial mastery of grade-level knowledge in reading, and one-fifth fail to reach partial mastery of grade-level knowledge in math (NCES, 2015), highlighting the prevalence of reading and math difficulties in childhood. Given we know that children who struggle in reading often also struggle in math, it is important to identify influences on the development of both reading and math. The overall goal of the proposed research is to uncover salient factors, including genetic and environmental influences, which contribute to the co-development of reading and math performance, at a critical developmental point (elementary school). We will identify the first nationally-representative US twin sample through the proposed National Project on Achievement in Twins (NatPAT). The NatPAT sample will comprise 7,668 pairs of twins located across the US, and will be uniquely situated to address the overall goal of the proposed research through four specific aims (SA). First, we will utilize a large national database of reading and math performance from schools across the country to ascertain the NatPAT twin sample. Using a cohort-sequential design starting in kindergarten, we will examine reading and math performance across elementary school in order to model genetic and environmental influences on reading and math (co-)development (Specific Aim 1). Second, we will model the genetic and environmental influences on the co-occurrence of reading and math difficulties, while also testing for sex differences (Specific Aim 2). Third, we will capitalize on publically available data to characterize the environmental contexts related to the (co-)development of reading and math performance (Specific Aim 3). Finally, we will capture important attitudinal individual differences dimensions and examine how they are associated with the (co-)development of reading and math performance (Specific Aim 4).
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District Permission
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IRB Permission
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