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Intervention: Ladders to Literacy for Kindergarten Students

Overview1

Ladders to Literacy is a supplemental early literacy curriculum published in Ladders to Literacy: A Kindergarten Activity Book. The program targets children at different levels and from diverse cultural backgrounds—those who are typically developing, have disabilities, or are at risk of reading failure. The activities are organized into three sections with about 20 activities each: print awareness, phonological awareness skills, and oral language skills. While a Ladders to Literacy curriculum is also available for preschool students (Ladders to Literacy: A Preschool Activity Book), this intervention report focuses on the Kindergarten version of the curriculum.

Research

Four studies of Ladders to Literacy met the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards with reservations. The studies included 760 students from Kindergarten classrooms at more than 14 elementary schools in urban and rural Midwest districts. 2 The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Ladders to Literacy to be moderate to large for alphabetics and comprehension and small for fluency. No studies that met WWC evidence standards with or without reservations addressed general reading achievement.

Effectiveness

The Ladders to Literacy program was found to have potentially positive effects on alphabetics and fluency and mixed effects on comprehension.

Alphabetics Fluency Comprehension General reading achievement
Rating of effectiveness Potentially positive effects Potentially positive effects Mixed effects na
Improvement index3 Average: +25 percentile points
Range: +8 to +47 percentile points		 +26 percentile points Average: +9 percentile points
Range: +1 to +17 percentile points		 na
na = not applicable
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from publicly available sources: the program's and distributor's web sites (www.wri-edu.org/ladders; www.brookespublishing.com; downloaded April 2007) and the research literature (O'Connor, 1999; Fuchs, Fuchs, Thompson, Al Otaiba, Yen, Yang et al., 2001). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
2 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
3 These numbers show the average and range of improvement indices for three of the four studies. One additional study that showed positive effects in alphabetics was not included in this average and range because effect sizes were not calculated at the student level.