Crane Center receives $4 million grant to scale high-quality literacy program across Ohio

COLUMBUS, September 28, 2022 – The Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The Ohio State University has received a $4 million grant in partnership with Ohio’s Department of Jobs and Family Services and Ohio Department of Education to expand its flagship early literacy and language program, Read It Again!.

Read It Again! is designed to strengthen young children’s early foundations in literacy and language and pave the way for enhanced kindergarten readiness. The grant allows the Crane Center to scale two versions of Read It Again! – one for infant/toddler educators and the other for preschool educators – to all early care and education providers in Ohio. Developed in 2005 by Dr. Laura Justice, executive director of the Crane and Schoenbaum Family Centers and distinguished professor of educational psychology in the College of Education and Human Ecology, RIA was developed in partnership with practitioners and administrators and has been studied extensively over the last decade. Its evidence base includes randomized control (“gold star”) studies, including one involving more than 7,000 children in Denmark whose teachers implemented a Danish version of Read It Again!.

RIA is designed for early educators working in birth-to-five settings and provides 60 lessons to be implemented over a 30-week period of instruction. Lessons guide teachers on how to use intentional teaching techniques in read-alouds to boost children’s skills in four readiness domains. The new grant will allow the Crane Center to develop online training tools for teachers and to distribute Read It Again! materials statewide.

Dr. Justice, co-principal investigator of the RIA-Ohio project, said, “We are thrilled to see our home state move so thoughtfully to expand access to this early learning tool to reach all of our early educators working in birth-to-five early learning programs. We are proud to see Ohio support this work so that more children can gain the skills necessary for reading success.”

RIA is also being scaled and studied in Franklin County through two additional community partnerships with Future Ready Columbus and through the Mayor’s Early Start Columbus-funded classrooms. The aim for these projects is to help more children enter school equipped with the early literacy skills necessary to succeed.