Effectiveness

Findings

The WWC review of interventions for beginning reading addresses student outcomes in four domains: alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. ⁵ The study reported here included outcomes for alphabetics and comprehension. Within alphabetics, the studies reviewed cover four constructs: phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print knowledge, and phonics.

Alphabetics. Hecht & Close (2002) examined nine student outcomes in the alphabetics domain: four phonological awareness outcomes (the Elision, Phonemic Blending, Phonemic Segmenting, and Sound Matching subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP); one letter identification outcome (a letter name knowledge test); one print awareness outcome (Stones—Concepts About Print test); and three phonics outcomes (the Letter Sound Knowledge and Letter Word Identification subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement–Revised and the Spelling subtest (with phonemic representation scoring)⁶ of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT). Hecht & Close (2002) reported statistically significant positive effects of the Waterford Early Reading Program™ for all nine outcomes. However, the WWC analysis found that none of these effects were statistically significant. The average effect size across all nine outcomes was large enough to be considered substantively important according to the WWC criteria (that is, an effect size of at least 0.25).

Comprehension. The study authors examined one vocabulary development outcome (the Vocabulary subtest of Stanford-Binet, Fourth Edition) and reported no statistically significant effect. The effect size was neither statistically significant nor substantively important.

Rating of effectiveness

The WWC rates the effects of an intervention in a given outcome domain as positive, potentially positive, mixed, no discernible effects, potentially negative, or negative. The rating of effectiveness takes into account four factors: the quality of the research design, the statistical significance of the findings,⁷ the size of the difference between participants in the intervention and the comparison conditions, and the consistency in findings across studies (see the WWC Intervention Rating Scheme).