Jocelyn Baca
McNair Scholar 2025
- Major(s): Speech and Hearing Sciences
- Classification: Senior
- Anticipated Graduation Date: Spring 2026
- Career Aspirations: After earning my bachelor's degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences, I plan to pursue a master's degree. I aim to attend a university with values and goals that align with mine and will help lay a strong foundation for my career as a certified Speech-Language Pathologist.
“My favorite part of this summer research experience was the valuable insight I gained through studying the specific intervention at the center of my project. It allowed me to focus on the educational setting in which Speech-Language Pathologists can practice, giving me a clearer vision of what that career path could look like for me. Additionally, the McNair Program provided a strong foundation for understanding the graduate school application process and introduced me to a range of helpful resources—both online and on campus—that will support me as I begin that journey.”
“Teaching Clinicians to Use Dialogic Reading”
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Traci Fredman
Dialogic reading is an intervention that promotes language and literacy skills in young children by taking an active role during shared book reading. For this study, graduate speech language pathology students who provided services at a local preschool completed a video training over dialogic reading. The student clinicians then read to children between the ages 3 and 5 with a diagnosis of a speech sound disorder or other language disorder using dialogic reading strategies. Following the reading sessions, the clinician's utterances were transcribed and coded for usage of dialogic reading strategies. The clinicians used the following strategies most frequently: print conventions, calling children’s attention to the text and pictures, and asking children to answer simple questions about the text and pictures. The results indicate that graduate clinicians can be taught to use dialogic reading strategies with brief training sessions. Future studies should focus on more in-depth training over dialogic reading, as well as highlighting which strategies to implement during their reading sessions that would promote clinicians being attentive to all elements of shared book reading, including the storytelling, the children's verbal responses and/or body language, and expanding on the children’s utterances.