Joshua Lawrence
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Better Equipped for School: LURI and Early Oral Language Assessment

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A Norwegian Research Council-funded project developing tools to help preschools identify children who may benefit from extra support for language comprehension before school entry.

Overview

Better Equipped for School (Bedre rustet) is a University of Oslo research project focused on identifying children in preschool who may benefit from extra support for language development. The project builds on work with LURI, a listening comprehension measure designed to assess how young children understand spoken stories, remember information, draw inferences, and reason from oral language.

The project connects closely to my broader interests in language assessment, early language-to-literacy pathways, vocabulary and listening comprehension, and the problem of translating assessment information into useful support for educators and families.

Visit the Bedre Rustet project website or see the official UiO project page.

Grant and collaboration

The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, project number 324207. It is led by Åste Mjelve Hagen at the University of Oslo, with collaborators including David Armas Hoff, Joshua Lawrence, Kristin Rogde, David Francis, and Paulina Kulesz.

The project also includes collaboration with the University of Houston, for the benefit of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics (TIMES), bringing measurement and methods expertise into the development and evaluation of the screening tool.

What the project studies

The project aims to support Norwegian preschools in identifying children at risk for language comprehension difficulties. It began by examining how Norwegian preschools currently assess children’s language understanding, then followed children’s language development from around age 2 to around age 5.

The Bedre Rustet project website explains that the study sought participation from approximately 500 children born in 2020 and 2021. Parents and preschool teachers completed questionnaires about children’s language development, and research assistants assessed children’s language in preschool settings. The most recent UiO update notes that the final round of data collection took place in September-October 2025.

LURI and research connection

LURI is central because it measures listening comprehension directly: children hear short stories and answer questions that require memory, vocabulary, inference, and understanding of spoken language. This matters because listening comprehension is a foundation for later reading comprehension and classroom learning, but it is difficult to assess well in developmentally appropriate ways.

My contribution connects the assessment work to questions about validity, language development, prediction, and how early oral language measures can inform support without overinterpreting a single test score. The project sits at the intersection of early identification, measurement, language intervention, and later literacy development.

Guiding questions

  • How can preschool teachers identify children who may need extra language support early enough for support to matter?
  • Which aspects of listening comprehension, memory, inference, and oral language are most useful for screening and follow-up?
  • How can a screening tool be quick and practical while still being psychometrically defensible?
  • How can assessment results support children with varied language experiences, including multilingual children?
  • What kinds of information help preschools decide when children need deeper assessment or language-support routines?

Selected related publications