Closing the Reading Gap

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

Background/Research Questions:

The Title I, Part A program is intended to help ensure that all children have the opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach proficiency on challenging state standards and assessments. As the largest federal program supporting elementary and secondary education (funded at $13.9 billion in FY 2008), these resources are targeted primarily to high-poverty districts and schools.

According to NAEP, in 2006 more than 36 percent of 4th graders read below the basic level. High school students in the bottom quartile of achievement are more likely than students in the top quartile to drop out of school. We know little about the effectiveness of programs to improve the reading skills of struggling readers in the upper elementary grades. This study examined:

• 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:

Reading programs were competitively selected that included in phonemic word-level interventions, supported text word-level interventions, and word-level plus comprehension interventions. The interventions evaluated were competitively selected and are appropriate for funding under Title I for improving the skills of struggling readers. 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 their school was assigned. Struggling students were identified by their teachers, assessed to confirm their achievement levels, and randomly assigned within schools to participate in the interventions or a control group. Teachers delivered the interventions during the 2003–04 school year in small groups to 3rd and 5th grade students whose verbal knowledge scores were between the 5th and 30th percentiles. The goal was to provide 100 hours of instruction for each student in the treatment group.

Duration: 3 years (September 4, 2003 – September 4, 2006)

Current Status: The interim report was released in February 2006, and the final report was released October 2007 (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pdf/20084013.pdf).

Key Findings

Younger students benefited more from the interventions than older students.

• For 3rd grade students the four interventions combined had impacts on phonemic decoding, word reading accuracy and fluency, and reading comprehension. The reading gap with the average population was narrowed for third graders participating in the interventions.
• For 5th grade students, the four interventions combined improved phonemic decoding on one measure, but led to a reduction in oral reading fluency. The three word-level interventions had similar impacts to the four interventions combined, but did not show an impact on reading comprehension.