2006-2007 Research Grants [08/10/2006]

USF Collaborative Awards One Service-Learning Grant and Seven Faculty Research Grants

Community engagement at the University of South Florida will take a big step forward in the 2006-2007 academic year thanks to grants from the USF Collaborative for Children, Families and Communities and the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County.

The grants cover a wide variety of subjects, but they all have one thing in common: they deal with service-learning instruction or community-based research. The research projects must also involve a collaboration of two or more academic disciplines or USF departments, and must involve a partnership between USF and one or more community partner.

Ranging in amounts from $5,000 to $15,000, the grants must support research or instruction that acquires, applies and/or disseminates knowledge, tests theories and addresses critical issues of public concern. The grants must also have the potential for impact beyond the preliminary funding.

Here are the 2006-2007 Grant Award winners and summaries of their research.

CSE Volunteer Program
Principal Investigator: Dewey Rundus, Computer Science and Engineering
Co-PI: Ken Christensen, Computer Science and Engineering
Community Partner: Sharon Zulli, Technology Support, School District of Hillsborough County

This service-learning course gives students an opportunity to combine community service with assisting in the technical support needs of selected schools in Hillsborough County, where students will work as teams for four hours per week doing hardware installation, networking and software maintenance. In addition to honing their computer abilities, students will develop interpersonal skills through interaction with individuals of diverse backgrounds and varying levels of technical sophistication. By functioning as mentors, students will also gain a better understanding of the opportunities and rewards of community service.

Integrating Reading Science into an Ethnic- and Self-Relevant Context
Principal Investigator: Thomas Sanocki, Psychology
Co-PIs: Ruth Huntley Bahr, Communication Sciences and Disorders; Karen Colucci, Special Education and Kathy Bradley-Klug, School Psychology
Community Partners: Kelly Leavy, Safe-t-Net, School District of Hillsborough County

This research will develop and evaluate a new tool designed to help children learn to read. Interactive in nature, the tool presents print-sound relations as animators that combine children’s own sounds with animated letters and words that show how sounds are produced. The program will also allow children to create stories, thereby incorporating ideas from the community’s culture into the reading material, so the community helps create the intervention. These innovations will be tested with at-risk early and pre-reading students (pre-K through grade four) from underprivileged areas of East Tampa. Pre- and post-intervention levels of reading will be measured and compared, and should support proposals for future large-scale studies.

Project Lighthouse: Linking Community and School through Literacy, Technology and Second Language Education
Principal Investigator: Linda Evans, Secondary Education
Co-PIs: Tony Erben, Mass Communications Community Partner: Manuel Duran, Alexander Elementary, School District of Hillsborough County

Project Lighthouse provides curricula support for a dual language education model for grades K-3 at Alexander Elementary School in Hillsborough County. The project is unique in that it will provide professional development for teachers in dual language teaching techniques, systematic in-servicing for teachers in subject-specific terminology in Spanish and ongoing community and parental guidance in literacy development. Project Lighthouse will also create online bilingual materials that will be attached to SEEDS (Support for Elementary Educators through Distance Learning in Spanish) a larger federal grant project, and will use technology to support home learning environments. Additional USF partners include the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) and the Media Innovation Team (MIT), whose technical assistance will transform this project from a valuable school/community-based initiative into a cutting-edge instructional tool.

Evaluation of WAIT Training
Principal Investigator: Darlene Shearer, Lawton & Rhea Chiles Center/Community & Family Health
Co-PI: Patricia Emmanuel, Pediatrics Community Partner: Pat Layton, A Woman’s Place

Partners from USF and A Woman’s Place (AWP) will use their combined resources to evaluate WAIT (Why Am I Tempted) Training, a component of IMPACT, a federal and state funded community-based program that reaches over 6,000 youth annually. The WAIT curriculum delivers key health and youth development messages through abstinence only education classes. The evaluation will involve 3,000 teens in Hillsborough County. A pre-post study design will be used and a small subset of volunteer teens will participate in a follow-up survey six months after training.

Camp Health Aides in Florida’s Citrus Groves
Principal Investigator: Paul Monaghan, Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC)
Co-PIs: Julie Baldwin, Carol Bryant and Robert McDermott, Community & Family Health; Thomas Bernard, Environmental & Occupational Health
Community Partner: Mark Wade, Director of Safety and Compliance, Evans Properties, Inc.

Eye injuries are a costly occupational hazard in agriculture that is largely preventable with the use of protective eyewear. The FPRC has previously designed and pilot tested a camp health aide (CHA) prevention project to promote eyewear usage and prevent eye injuries among citrus workers. FPRC will partner with the Farm Workers Association of Florida and Evans Properties, Inc., a large citrus company in Pasco County, to implement the project through a large scale efficacy trial in the Evans groves. By disseminating the results to the community partners, the project has the potential to change occupational safety efforts in the citrus industry statewide.

Mental Health Service Use after a Disaster—What Matters?
Principal Investigator: Lisa Brown, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute
Co-PI: Carol Bryant, College of Public Health
Community Partners: Maureen S. Kelly, East Central Florida Area Agency on Aging, Inc., and Julie Framington, Federal Disaster Behavioral Health Project, DCF

A one-year pilot project, this research will focus on the development and application of comprehensive social marketing methods to promote the use of behavioral health services by older adults with disaster-related psychological distress. The project’s goal is to promote, develop and evaluate programs to increase resilience and protective factors, and to reduce hurricane-related psychological distress. Findings from this study will be used to obtain funding to conduct the next phases of this project, a statewide effort in collaboration with the West Central Florida Agency on Aging and the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Relations between Weight Status and the Food and Activity Choices of Adolescents
Principal Investigator: Kathleen Armstrong, College of Medicine
Co-PIs: Allison Edmonds, College of Nursing; Heather Curtiss, Pediatrics
Community Partners: Binita Patel, Prevention Specialist, School District of Hillsborough County

This study will determine whether there is a relationship between the weight, status, ethnicity and gender of adolescents and their dietary intake and physical activity. Five schools are participating in the study with the support of the staff of Steps to a Healthier Hillsborough Initiative, School District of Hillsborough County. This research will conduct analyses to determine whether an overall relationship exists in dietary intake behaviors and in physical activity behaviors between weight category groups by gender and ethnicity. The data will influence school district programming on adolescent health to allow researchers to develop interventions targeting health promotion and protective factors.

Creating Teaching Tools for Young Children with Challenging Behavior in Child Care
Principal Investigator: Bobbie Vaughn, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute
Co-PI: Sylvia F. Diehl, Communications Science Disorders
Community Partners: Mary E. Harper, School Readiness Program, School District of Hillsborough County

This project will provide early childhood educators who serve at-risk children from predominately African-American and Latino communities with a comprehensive, effective, easy-to-navigate intervention package that promotes communication, friendships and social/emotional competence while addressing challenging behavior in preschool children. A prepackaged intervention kit includes an array of strategies on CD-ROM as well as materials that reflect cultural competence with widespread community impact. The project will evaluate the efficacy of the intervention package, further develop the package to enhance cultural competence and support widespread community dissemination of the product.