Project Activities
Students will be randomized to receive LLI Intermediate or business as usual comparison in small groups of 4 students daily in 45-minute sessions for 24 weeks (120 sessions). Following intervention, student outcomes will be measured. Third grade students participating in the intervention will continue in their randomly assigned condition (LLI Intermediate or comparison) for a second year in fourth grade. Following the two years of intervention implementation (end of fourth grade), student outcomes will be measured. Researchers will examine students' initial reading achievement as a moderator of response to the intervention. In addition, researchers will measure classroom teacher perceptions of behavior/attention to determine whether they moderate student response to the intensive intervention provided over 2 years. They will also examine implementation outcomes as a mediator of treatment effects.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This randomized, controlled trial will take place in diverse elementary schools in Tennessee and Texas. Students will be selected from two Title I school districts serving large numbers of minority students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to provide the diversity necessary to generalize to the target population of students with reading difficulties or disabilities from a range of backgrounds (race, ethnicity, primary language diversity, and socioeconomic status).
Sample
The study will include successive cohorts of 200 third grade students with reading difficulties or disabilities, totaling 400 students over two years.
Intervention
The multi-component LLI Intermediate reading intervention used in this study is in wide use, but it has never been rigorously evaluated at the third and fourth grade levels. LLI Intermediate is a supplemental intervention for students with reading difficulties or disabilities. The lessons include word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The intervention is provided daily for 45-minute sessions in small groups of 4 students.
Research design and methods
Efficacy will be tested using a randomized control trial with students assigned randomly to experimental and comparison conditions. Researchers will examine the immediate (end of third grade) and long-term (beginning of fourth grade) effects after one year of implementation. They will also examine the long-term effects (beginning of fifth grade) after two years of implementation.
Control condition
Students randomly assigned to the comparison group will receive the reading intervention currently provided by the school.
Key measures
Key measures include Woodcock-Johnson Psycho Educational Test Battery-III: Letter Word Identification, Word Attack, and Passage Comprehension; Test of Word Reading Efficiency: Word Reading Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency; Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests: Reading Comprehension; and DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency. Researchers will collect data from observations and document review (such as lesson plans) on instructional practices implemented in the treatment and comparison conditions using LLI fidelity measures as well as parallel observation measures to directly compare critical features in conditions.
Data analytic strategy
A series of latent difference models with students nested in clusters will be used to test for immediate and long-term differences between study conditions on measures of word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Multilevel modeling will be used to account for the clustering structure. Researchers will examine possible sources of variation that may affect student response or teacher/school implementation of the interventions through moderation and mediation analyses. For those outcomes that demonstrate a significant treatment effect, researchers will investigate potential moderators of this effectiveness to best describe how these student characteristics (initial reading achievement, behavior/attention) may interact and impact student outcomes. Researchers will also explore the effect of fidelity of implementation on the relationship between treatment and reading outcomes. These analyses will allow a more detailed description of how implementation of the intervention may interact and impact the outcomes.
Cost analysis strategy
The costs of providing the LLI Intermediate program will be assessed using the ingredients approach. Researchers will catalogue resources that would be needed to replicate every aspect of LLI Intermediate beyond those already required for typical instruction. A cost effectiveness ratio will be used with the effect sizes resulting from study. The cost effectiveness ratio computed will represent the cost per one standard deviation gain (pre- to post-treatment) in each outcome measured for the treatment and comparison groups.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products Products include information about the efficacy of Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) Intermediate. The project will also result in a final data set, peer-reviewed publications, and presentations as well as additional dissemination products that reach education stakeholders, such as practitioners and policymakers.
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator: Sharon Vaughn, The University of Texas at Austin
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
