Reading Recovery Follow-up Study

The purpose of the Efficacy Follow-up Study of the Long-Term Effects of Reading Recovery is to test the sustained efficacy of Reading Recovery (RR), an intensive one-on-one reading instruction program for the lowest-achieving first grade students, on state test scores in third and fourth grade. Many first grade students struggle with reading and for some of these students, low literacy achievement in first grade can set them up for continued difficulty in literacy throughout elementary school and beyond. The Reading Recovery program is based on the idea that individualized, short-term, and highly-responsive instruction delivered by an expert teacher can disrupt this trajectory and allow the lowest achieving students to catch up to their peers. This study is a follow-up study to an i3-funded scale-up study of the Reading Recovery program.

Intervention: Reading Recovery is a fully-developed program that uses intensive one-on-one reading instruction for the lowest-achieving first grade students in a school. These students receive 12- to 20-week cycles of daily, 30-minute, one-on-one lessons from specially trained Reading Recovery expert teachers. Lessons target phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Reading Recovery teachers receive specialized training that prepares them to tailor lessons to an individual student’s strengths and needs. Each lesson begins with re-reading familiar books, followed by word and letter work, story composition, assembling a cut-up sentence, and previewing and reading a new book. Reading Recovery also relies on continuous collection of data to gauge student progress.

Study Activities: In this study, the researchers will obtain state test scores for students who participated in the original i3 study as well as students from non-i3 schools to see if the impact of Reading Recovery is sustained through third and fourth grades. In addition to collecting students’ third and fourth grade reading or English language arts state test scores, we will administer an online survey through which RR Teacher Leaders or Teachers will research and document the experience of individual Reading Recovery and comparison group students in terms of continued performance monitoring to detect a recurrence of reading problems and participation in supplemental reading programs and interventions. Data from approximately 40,000 students from up to 2,400 schools will be collected for this study.

If you have any questions about this study or data collection activities, please contact the IDEC Helpdesk at helpdesk@idecweb.us or email the research team directly at CRESP at cresp-rr@udel.edu.