Reading Recovery is a first-grade literacy intervention program with notable short-term benefits, but there are sustainability studies that highlight inconclusive evidence of its enduring success. It was unclear if formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students continue to have long-term literacy skill retention after exiting the literacy intervention. The problem was essential to this rural district because Reading Recovery was costly to implement, and the literacy standardized test scores remained low. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students had sustainable literacy skills. The theoretical framework was the literacy processing theory, which entails how emergent learners develop literacy processing systems. The research question was to determine if there was a significant difference in the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress standardized test scores between the 73 formerly enrolled and 38 nonenrolled students. The independent variable was enrollment in Reading Recovery, and the dependent variable was ISTEP+ standardized literacy scores. The independent sample t-test results showed no statistically significant difference in ISTEP+ standardized literacy scores. The results were the basis for the creation of the 3-day professional development training for educators in grades 2 and 3. The training will promote positive social change since it will support the continued literacy progress of formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students. Students with solid literacy skills will have better future employment opportunities and higher social engagement in American society.

Although there is an extensive amount of literature on the developmental stages of beginning therapists and the challenges they face, little is known about one of their most difficult challenges; transferring theory learned in class to their practice. This study is a qualitative look at how beginning therapists learn to apply theory to their practice. Ten students who were beginning therapists with at least 75 hours of client contact hours were interviewed from four different universities with accredited marriage and family therapy programs. The study was conducted using a phenomenological perspective to explore how beginning therapists begin to apply theory to their practice. Using the constant comparison method of analysis, five major themes emerged from the interviews as well as a general developmental process that help to describe how beginning therapists apply theory to their practice. The main themes found include before seeing clients, early process of theory application, what was helpful, later process of theory application and a reflection of that process. Implications for beginning therapists and training programs as well as future research are indicated. / Master of Science

The present study examined the effect of first-list stimulus context (color versus no color) and two degrees of first-list learning (twenty trials versus five trials) on cue selection and transfer of training. College students learned two paired-associate lists consisting of highly similar trigrams as the stimulus terms and nouns as the response terms. The second list consisted of twelve items presented on homogeneous white backgrounds for eighteen trials. Four secondlist items represented each of three transfer paradigms--A -B,A-B; A-B,A-C; and A-BC-D. It was concluded that color context draws attention to the color-backed items during the early stages of learning but is not selected for encoding until the later stages of learning.