Closing the Reading Gap

Contractors: Florida State University (FSU) and Corporation for the Advancement of Policy Evaluation

Key Staff:
Joe Torgeson, Florida State
Allen Schirm, CAPE/Mathematica

Research Questions:

• Can children who have reading difficulties in middle to late elementary school acquire adequate reading skills in a short period of time if they are taught with intensity and skill?
• Can intensive interventions affect all critical reading skills, such as accuracy, comprehension, and fluency?
• Do some children benefit more or less from these intensive and well-implemented reading interventions?

Design: FSU competitively selected developers of reading programs in phonemic word-level interventions, supported text word-level interventions, and word-level plus comprehension interventions. They are Corrective Reading, Failure Free Reading, Spell Read P.A.T., and Wilson Reading. Teachers were randomly assigned to the interventions and received professional development to implement the intervention to which they were assigned. Teachers delivered the interventions during the 2003-04 school year in small groups of 3rd to 5th grade students whose verbal knowledge scores were between the 5th and 30th percentiles. Students were randomly assigned to participate in the treatment or to receive the normal instruction provided by the school.

Duration: 3 1/2 years (September 2003 - December 2007).

Reports: The report, Volume II, Closing the Reading Gap: Findings from a Randomized Trial of Four Reading Interventions for Striving Readers, was released in November 2007.
To download a copy of the report go to http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20084012/index.asp.
For more information on the study visit http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/education/power4kids.asp.

Current Status: (December 2007) The study has been completed.