Building Sustainable Models of Research-Practice Partnerships Within Educational Systems

Alonzo, C. N., Komesidou, R., Wolter, J. A., Curran, M., Ricketts, J., & Hogan, T. P. (2022). Building Sustainable Models of Research-Practice Partnerships Within Educational Systems. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 1-13.

    The research-practice gap refers to a disconnect between the latest evidence regarding practice in a field and the practices used in clinical settings. In speech-language pathology there is a current and ongoing movement for the use of implementation science to minimize the research-practice gap. Implementation science studies strategies that facilitate the movement of evidence-based practices into clinical settings. Central to implementation science are sustainable collaborations between researchers and those who use the research or knowledge, called knowledge users. Given the importance of partnerships, researchers have begun to look at how to build partnerships. Henrick and colleagues (2017) propose five critical dimensions for successful partnerships that include: (1) building trust and cultivating partnership relationships, (2) conducting research to inform action, (3) supporting the partner organization in achieving their goals, (4) producing knowledge to inform educational efforts, and (5) building capacity of participating researchers, knowledge users, and the organization.

    In the current article, the authors apply this partnership framework to their own partnerships in elementary schools. They outline three different ongoing partnerships in which they have been involved and describe the characteristics of the three schools, and the researchers and knowledge users included in each partnership. Each partnership also included the use of a knowledge broker who worked with the knowledge users and researchers to support the partnership and its success. The authors then mapped their own experiences onto the five dimensions proposed by Henrick et al., (2017). These authors report that their collaborative projects improved clinical knowledge for both the researchers and knowledge users.

    By sharing their experiences of working in partnerships, the authors provide an example of successful partnerships and how their partnership activities map onto an established framework in the field. Since there is a lot of momentum in communication sciences and disorders to use knowledge translation approaches such as implementation science, examples demonstrating experiences and outcomes support others looking to use similar approaches.

                 

         

Blogger: Meghan Vollebregt is a student in the combined SLP MClSc/PhD program working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald.

The duality of patterning in language and its relationship to reading in children with hearing loss

Nittrouer, S., (2020). The duality of patterning in language and its relationship to reading in children with hearing loss. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 5, pp. 1400-1409.

    By the time we reach adulthood, reading is something we do without thinking about it. However, reading is a task that we spend years of our lives learning to do and practicing as children. It involves coordinating multiple skills, from recognizing the letters on a page to understanding the meaning behind what is written. Nittrouer (2020) discusses the concept of duality of patterning in which two different levels of structure are involved in reading: the semantic level, referring to the words that make up speech and their meanings, and the phonological level, referring to the sounds that make up words. These two levels work together in language, but develop somewhat separately. When learning a new language, development begins with the semantic level (or meaning) followed by the phonological level (or sounds).

    For children with hearing loss, some of the auditory information they hear will be degraded (even with hearing aids), which causes more problems for learning phonological than semantic information. To look at how this impacts the learning to read in children, Nittrouer (2020) followed a group of 122 US children: 49 with normal hearing (NH), 19 with moderate hearing loss and using a hearing aid (HA), and 54 with moderate-to-profound hearing loss and using a cochlear implant (CI) from infancy to grade 8. The researchers found that those with hearing loss had lower vocabulary skills than those with normal hearing, with the CI group showing lower performance than the HA group. On measures of phonological structure, children with normal hearing had higher scores than their peers with hearing loss, and again, those with CIs scored lower than those with HAs. Although these skills improved for everyone, by grade 8, the CI group had reached a level equivalent to that of the normal hearing group in grade 2, suggesting significant difficulty for the CI group in phonological structure. In reading, the normal group used phonological processes for phonological tasks and semantic processes for semantic tasks. In contrast, however, the groups with hearing loss used both phonological and semantic processes for phonological and semantic tasks, suggesting that they relied on a combination of both, especially for the phonological tasks.

    The authors suggest that intervention for children with hearing loss should include the use of meaningful structures, visual speech signals, and target both the semantic and phonological levels of structure throughout childhood.

Blogger: Rachel Benninger is a combined MClSc/PhD student working under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Archibald