Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition© (CIRC)

Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® was found to have potentially positive effects on comprehension and general literacy achievement for adolescent learners.

Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® is a reading and writing program for students in grades 2 through 6. It has three principal elements: story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated language arts/writing. Daily lessons provide students with an opportunity to practice comprehension and reading skills in pairs and small groups. Pairs of students read to each other; predict how stories will end; summarize stories; write responses to questions posed by the teacher; and practice spelling, decoding, and vocabulary. Within cooperative teams of four, students work to understand the main idea of a story and work through the writing activities linked to the story. A Spanish version of the program is available for grades 2 through 5.

Two studies of Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® that fall within the scope of the Adolescent Literacy review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards with reservations. The two studies included approximately 1,460 students in grades 2 through 6 who attended nine schools located in two school districts in the United States.

Based on these two studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® on adolescent learners to be medium to large for the comprehension and general literacy achievement domains. No studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations examined the effectiveness of Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition^® on adolescent learners in the alphabetics or reading fluency domains.