Franklin College was awarded a grant focused on future elementary teachers and improving the literacy rate of Indiana’s elementary student population.
Lilly Endowment Inc. awarded the institution a $500,000 grant as part of a two-phase initiative from Advancing the Science of Reading in Indiana, or ASRI. The endowment recently awarded a total of $25.1 million in ASRI grants to 28 higher education institutions including Franklin College.
The funds will be used to better train students in the college’s education program so that they are more familiar with the updated instructional material to be utilized by current elementary school teachers.
“We greatly appreciate the continued investment of Lilly Endowment Inc. in Indiana higher education and in Franklin College,” President Kerry N. Prather said. “The most critical key to lifelong learning is a strong foundation in reading skills. We are excited to leverage this grant opportunity to enhance our preparation of elementary teachers and ultimately help improve the literacy skills of Indiana students.”
Prather said that this was the first time that Lilly Endowment Inc. made the college this kind of offer, with this particular grant focused on addressing the literacy rate in Hoosier kindergarten through third graders.
The grant primarily focuses on embracing “the science of reading,” which is a body of research dedicated to issues related to reading and writing and the ways children learn these skills, Prather said.
Cindy Prather, director of teacher education and the college’s teacher licensing advisor, said that Franklin College originally embraced scientific reading research several decades ago. It has remained a fundamental component of their elementary education program.
“This grant will further support those efforts and strengthen the science of reading expertise of our faculty and the preparation of our elementary education majors,” Cindy Prather said.
She is credited with leading the effort to acquire the grant funds.
“Our intent is to use the grant for internal purposes; to build our science of reading capacity with our education faculty,” she said. “We have been teaching scientifically-based reading instruction for a number of years. This grant allows us to reexamine our core curriculum and to dive deeper into the science of reading, which is the new term for scientifically-based reading instruction. It will also allow us to be more specific and intentional with our teaching.”
Additional research on scientifically-based reading has pushed Franklin College to stay up to date on the latest teaching methodologies. This grant will allow the institution to align its instruction with new state laws passed by recent state legislatures, Cindy Prather said.
With the law, students must be brought up to speed as quickly as possible, she said.
Teaching the science of reading is hoped to improve Hoosier student’s low reading scores. Only 33% of Indiana fourth graders scored proficient in reading comprehension in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”
There are five main aspects to the science of reading, according to Cindy Prather:
- Phonemic awareness — the ability to identify individual sounds in words.
- Phonics — the understanding of how letters and groups of letters sound together.
- Vocabulary instruction — understanding the definitions of words and how to properly use them in sentences.
- Fluency — which focuses on a student’s ability to read words and sentences correctly with appropriate speed and expression.
- Comprehension — the student’s ability to understand what they are reading.
These areas of focus are based on the International Dyslexia Association’s standards and their methods. Because of new research, the way elementary students are taught is continuously evolving, Cindy Prather said.
“The materials that the K-12 schools will be choosing from for literacy instruction are going to be changing,” she said. “That will all be aligned with the science of reading. We want to be able to examine these new curriculum materials as they are made available so that we have our students prepared to step right into the classroom upon graduation and know what they are expected to teach.
“It is very important to us to know what is current and what is happening in terms of K-12 so we can have our students best prepared.”
Franklin College has a clinical field-based program in elementary education. Students go to partner schools and begin to work with elementary students from their sophomore to senior year, with most graduating with nearly 1,000 hours in elementary classrooms.
The college was awarded a $75,000 planning grant through Lilly Endowment’s initiative in December 2022. Those funds allowed the college to explore opportunities for leveraging its knowledge and resources to benefit Indiana teachers and their K-3 students. The process included an examination of the most current science of reading research and practices while collaborating with alumni educators to determine how best to prepare future teachers, according to a press release.
