Dr. Amy Murdoch's 'Project Ready!', an initiative to develop research-based best practices for early literacy and language learning for children, has been selected as a grant finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation.
Professor Amy Murdoch, Ph.D., helped launch Project Ready!, which has been selected as a grant finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation. Dr. Murdoch serves as department chair and associate professor in the Department of Graduate Education, and as program director of the Mount's online Reading Science program.
This past year, Dr. Murdoch and her team worked with teachers on the initiative to develop research-based best practices for early literacy and language learning for children. As part of the Scripps Howard Foundation, the grant serves to bolster childhood literacy throughout the country. Dr. Murdoch's team is one of three finalists selected.
"Our goal with the project is to reduce the early readiness gap that we see that exists between children living in poverty and their more advantaged peers," Dr. Murdoch tells WCPO. "We know from the research that children living in poverty don’t have access to the language and literacy experiences of middle-class or professional children."
Thus, Dr. Murdoch and her team facilitated a 16-week pilot program in hopes to expand into a two-year preschool curriculum.
"We had dramatic results which really showed we were able to significantly reduce and even close the achievement gap between children living in poverty and middle-class children," she says.
The project consists of 4 parts: A core preschool curriculum, (Joyful Discoveries), Playful Interventions, Family Education, and Teacher Professional Learning. To listen to a webinar on Project Ready!, visit
To learn more about the fully online Reading Science program offering at the Mount, visit /reading-science/
Source cited: WCPO Staff. (2020, March 23). These nonprofits were selected as finalists in local $100,000 literacy grant competition. Retrieved from