In the News

Youth Recommend Improvements in Schools

Over the years 2003-2008, the Amy Kohlberg Quinlan Internship Program sponsored by the USF Collaborative for Children, Families and Communities offered teens research-oriented summer internships to study ways to improve the quality of youth development in their communities. As the school year winds to a close, we want to re-cap some of their suggestions for enhancing effective education [more]

Jazz Professor, Composer Awarded One of the Most Prestigious Academic Recognitions in the World

Chuck Owen is the only Guggenheim Fellow in 2009 from a Florida university [more]

Integrating Reading Science into an Ethnic- and Self-Relevant Context [read more about it]

This research will develop and evaluate a new tool designed to help children learn to read. Interactive in nature, the tool presents print-sound relations as animators that combine children’s own sounds with animated letters and words that show how sounds are produced. The program will also allow children to create stories thereby incorporating ideas from the community’s culture into the reading material. Thus the community helps create the intervention as opposed to having the intervention done to them.

These innovations will be tested with at-risk early and pre-reading students (pre-K through grade four) from underprivileged areas of East Tampa. Pre- and post-intervention levels of reading will be measured and compared, and should support proposals for future large-scale studies.