Evidence Based Narrative Language Intervention Tool for MTSS: Story Champs

If your school or special education department is looking for ways to support teachers with providing meaningful language intervention through the multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) prior to referring students for a speech language evaluation, then check out this study 👇🏽

The Study

A randomized controlled trial by Peterson et. al (2022) examined the effects of a multitiered system of language support on kindergarteners' narrative retelling, personal stories, writing, and expository language using Story Champs.

Participants included 686 kindergarten students from four school districts in the United States. Twenty-eight classrooms were randomly assigned to the treatment group (n = 337 students) or control (n = 349 students) group.

All students in the treatment group received Tier I whole group oral narrative language instruction from their actual teachers 15-20 minutes twice a week for 14 weeks.

A select group of below benchmark students also received Tier II small group intervention from a speech-language pathologist (SLP) for 20 minutes twice a week in addition to Tier I whole group intervention.

Tier I Results:

Students scored much better than comparison students on narrative retell and somewhat better on personal story generation, expository retell, and narrative writing. 

Tier II Results:

Students scored much better on narrative retell, personal story generation, and expository retell (with no difference in writing), compared to a group of children who scored below benchmark on narrative retell but only received only Tier 1 instruction.

Students also outperformed a group of above-average students from the no-treatment comparison group on narrative retells and scored similarly on the other measures.

How awesome is that?! Imagine how much progress students could make and how the number of referrals for language evaluations would decrease if students were provided with an intervention program like this! 🌟

Not familiar with Story Champs? Read on to learn more 👇🏽

Story champs

Story Champs is a multi-tiered language intervention curriculum used to teach story structure, vocabulary, complex linguistic features, and informational text structure.

It can be used by SLP's in therapy sessions - and now we know if can be used for MTSS as well!

There are even video resources and demonstrations on the Language Dynamics Group website that can be used to train teachers, reading interventionists, and paraprofessionals on how to use Story Champs! 🙌🏽

Check them out here.

‼️ With the school year coming to a close, it may be a good idea to pitch this intervention idea to your department lead, school administrators, and fellow SLP's so the powers that be can consider providing a training session at the beginning of next school year for all kindergarten teachers and their para's!

Hope this has been helpful! 😊