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Overview1
Program Description2
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.
Research
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.3
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.
Effectiveness
Reading Recovery® was found to have positive effects on alphabetics and general reading achievement and potentially positive effects on fluency and comprehension.
| 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 |
2 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly available source: the program’s website (http://www.readingrecovery.org, downloaded September 2008). 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.
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
4 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.
