A Eugene-based early literacy expert has been awarded a $1.5 million federal grant to study how best to teach the alphabet to preschoolers.

Patricia Vadasy

Patricia Vadasy, a senior research scientist at the non-profit Oregon Research Institute, will spend three years testing different ways of teaching the ABCs to diverse groups of preschoolers to find out what works best.

"Alphabet knowledge is important for students' success with word reading and spelling development," she wrote in her winning research proposal. "Although learning letter names and sounds may appear to be a simple task, research suggests that many children from low socioeconomic status families, including many with limited English proficiency, enter and exit preschool with limited alphabet knowledge."

That is borne out in the results of Oregon's kindergarten readiness test.

Vadasy said that evaluations of widely-used curricula designed to teach preschoolers their ABCs "show inconsistent and modest effects, and there is limited information on the components of alphabet instruction that are effective."

By the end of the three year investigation, she and her research team will issue guidelines on how preschools should best teach letter names and sounds. It is possible they will cover how to teach them as part of reading stories, chanting aloud together or learning to write one's name.

Theresa Roberts, a professor at California State University Sacramento, will co-lead the study. It will be conducted in preschool classrooms in the North Highlands, California, near Sacramento.

The grant comes from the National Center for Education Research, which has awarded many grants to the Oregon Research Institute as well as to Vadasy at her previous employer, the Washington Research Institute.

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com