E. Characteristics of Students in the Evaluation

The characteristics of the students in the evaluation sample are shown in Table 1. About 45 percent of the students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. In addition, about 27 percent were African American, and 73 percent were white. Fewer than two percent were Hispanic. Roughly 33 percent of the students had a learning disability or other disability.

On average, the students in our evaluation sample scored about one-half to one standard deviation below national norms (mean 100 and standard deviation 15) on measures used to assess their ability to decode words. For example, on the Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (WRMT-R), the average standard score was 93. This translates into a percentile ranking of 32. On the TOWRE test for phonemic decoding efficiency (PDE), the average standard score was 83, at approximately the 13th percentile. On the measure of word reading accuracy (Word Identification subtest for the WRMT-R), the average score placed these students at the 23rd percentile. For word reading fluency, the average score placed them at the 16th percentile for word reading efficiency (TOWRE SWE), and third- and fifth-grade students, respectively, read 41 and 77 words per minute on the oral reading fluency passages (Aimsweb). In terms of reading comprehension, the average score for the WRMT-R test of passage comprehension placed students at the 30th percentile, and for the Group Reading and Diagnostic Assessment (GRADE), they scored, on average, at the 23rd percentile.

This sample, as a whole, was substantially less impaired in basic reading skills than most samples used in previous research with older reading disabled students. These earlier studies typically examined samples in which the phonemic decoding and word reading accuracy skills of the average student were below the tenth percentile and, in some studies, at only about the first or second percentile. Students in such samples are much more impaired and more homogeneous in their reading abilities than the students in this evaluation and in the population of all struggling readers in the United States. Thus, it is not known whether the findings from these previous studies pertain to broader groups of struggling readers in which the average student's reading abilities fall between, say, the 20th and 30th percentiles. This evaluation can help to address this issue. It obtained a broad sample of struggling readers, and is evaluating in regular school settings the kinds of intensive reading interventions that have been widely marketed by providers and widely sought by school districts to improve such students' reading skills.

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