Overview
Program Description1
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.
Research2
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 schools3 located in two school districts in the United States.4
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.
Effectiveness
Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition® was found to have potentially positive effects on comprehension and general literacy achievement for adolescent learners.
| Alphabetics | Reading fluency | Comprehension | General literacy achievement | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | na |
na | Potentially positive effects | Potentially positive effects |
| Improvement index5
|
na |
na |
Average: +7 percentile points | Average: +2 percentile points |
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly available source: the WWC Beginning Reading intervention report (July 2007). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. The program description was updated by the developer in December 2008. Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review. The literature search reflects documents publicly available by March 2010.
2 The studies in this report were reviewed using WWC Evidence Standards, Version 2.0 (see WWC Procedures and Standards Handbook, Chapter III), as described in protocol Version 2.0.
3 The Adolescent Literacy topic area reviews studies of interventions administered to students in grades 4–12 (or 9–18 years of age). For studies that include samples of students that span both the Adolescent Literacy (grades 4–12) and Beginning Reading (grades K–3) topic areas and cannot be disaggregated by grade level, the Adolescent Literacy topic area also reviews any studies that include 5th-grade students or higher. For example, this report includes a combined sample of students from grades 2–6 (Jewell, 1994; Stevens & Slavin, 1995).
4 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
5 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.