Reading Recovery®

Reading Recovery^® was found to have positive effects on alphabetics and general reading achievement and potentially positive effects on fluency and comprehension.

Reading Recovery^® is a short-term tutoring intervention intended to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of Reading Recovery^® are to promote literacy skills, reduce the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read, and prevent long-term reading difficulties. Reading Recovery^®supplements classroom teaching with one-to-one tutoring sessions, generally conducted as pull-out sessions during the school day. Tutoring, which is conducted by trained Reading Recovery^® teachers, takes place daily for 30 minutes over 12–20 weeks.

Four studies of Reading Recovery^® meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards, and one study meets WWC evidence standards with reservations. The five studies included approximately 700 first-grade students in more than 46 schools across the United States.

Based on these five studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Reading Recovery^® to be medium to large for alphabetics, small for fluency and comprehension, and medium to large for general reading achievement.