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Overview
Reading Recovery® is a short-term tutoring intervention program intended to serve the lowest achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. According to the Reading Recovery® website, lessons incorporate the program's ten principles: phonological awareness, visual perception of letters, word recognition, phonics/decoding skills, phonics/structural analysis, fluency/automaticity, comprehension, a balanced literacy approach, early intervention, and individual tutoring. Students are chosen for Reading Recovery® by school staff, and selection is based on prior reading achievement, diagnostic testing (the Clay Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement), and teacher recommendations. The goals of Reading Recovery® are to promote literacy skills and reduce the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read. The program supplements classroom teaching with one-on-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.1
Research
Four studies of Reading Recovery® met the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards, and one study met WWC evidence standards with reservations. These five studies included about 700 first-grade students attending elementary schools in diverse settings across the United States. All studies focused on low-achieving students who received the Reading Recovery® intervention in first grade. Generally, outcomes at the end of first grade were used by the WWC to calculate a rating of effectiveness.2 In one study, longer range effects were included.3
Effectiveness
Reading Recovery® was found to have positive effects on students' alphabetics skills and general reading achievement outcomes. The program was found to have potentially positive effects on comprehension and fluency.
| Alphabetics | Fluency | Comprehension | General reading achievement | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | Positive effects | Potentially positive effects | Potentially positive effects | Positive effects |
| Improvement index4 | Average: +34 percentile points Range: -10 to +50 percentile points |
Average: +46 percentile points Range: +32 to +49 percentile points |
Average: +14 percentile points Range: +6 to +21 percentile points |
Average: +32 percentile points Range: -5 to +50 percentile points |
| na = not applicable | ||||
2 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
3 Additional findings on outcomes measured at later time points are shown in Appendix A4.4.
4 These numbers show the average and range of improvement indices for all findings across the studies.
