Reading Recovery—Does it work?-Staff Presentation Patti Lapham January 15, 2011 Classroom Reading and Writing-

What is it?  A early intervention program that detects students who are behind early in their academic careers.  It is a widely used early intervention for the lowest performing first-graders.  It is a one on one tutorial intervention that increases emerging literacy abilities for students of all diverse populations.

What is the goal of this early intervention?  To reduce the number of students have severe difficulty developing the literacy skills they need.  To reduce the cost of educating these students with this difficulty.  To help these students to develop reading and writing strategies that are necessary to function in a regular classroom.

Who qualifies to be in this program?  Students who are in the first grade.  Students who are ranked in the low 10% of their class by their reading abilities.  Students who are not making progress in reading.

What is some background information on RR?  It was developed by Marie Clay in  It was initially implemented in New Zealand.  It was implemented in the United States in 1984 by Clay.  It is presently offered in 49 states.

What happens once the students are selected for RR?  The first 10 days are spent on the teacher building trust with the student. (reading, writing, analyzing the child’s behavior, and observing)  The teacher then goes into daily one-on-one 30 minute lessons that will continue for weeks of tutorial  lessons or until the RR teacher feels the child is ready to return to regular instruction in the classroom.

Reading Recovery Format 10 minutes:Familiar Reading (Leveled Books) Running Record 10 minutes:Letter Identification Writing Cut-up Story 10 minutes:New Book Introduction Reread New Book (child attempted)

Does this program work? Research on the Reading Recovery intervention remains controversial. Three peer reviewed publications that are most relevent to issues of intervention effectiveness and efficiency: Center, Wheldall, ?Freeman, Outhred, and McNaught (1995) Iversen and Tunmer (1993) Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow (2001)

Center, et al (1995) Examined progress of 3 groups on a variety of reading-related measures across the beginning, middle and end of the the first grade and again in the middle of second grade. The lowest achieving students across 10 schools were randomly assigned to the RR intervention at the beginning of first grade or to a control group. A comparison group of low-achieving students from five similar schools without the RR intervention were also assessed at each test period.

Center, et al., Results The three groups did not differ significantly on any of the measures on the pretreatment assessment. The standard and modified RR groups scored significantly higher than children in the small-group intervention at discontinuation. (over 8 standard deviations) Comparisons of the two RR groups with average students from their classrooms showed similar profiles, with the only significant differences in favor of the RR groups.

Iversen and Tunmer (1993) Compared two versions of the RR program against a small- group intervention. The two groups were referred to the Standard RR program and the Modified RR program. In both these groups the teachers used the standard RR framework. The modified RR teachers added procedures to the letter identification component so that when children could identify 35 upper and lowercase alphabet, the teachers began to use some of the time in this section of the lesson to manipulate letters in familiar words to make new words.

Iversen and Tunmer (1993), continued. These students were assessed at three time periods: Pre-intervention, at the end of the RR program, and at the end of the first grade school year. Results: significant and large effects of the RR group on all measures at the middle and end of first grade. A year after the intervention period, the RR group continued to score higher than both the control and comparison gorups on all measures. Efficiency: Conducted an analysis of students in the RR, Control, and comparison groups based on test results collected in the middle of the second grade school year.

Iverson and Tunmer (1993), results Concluded that 65% of the RR groups appeared to be reading at, near, or above average levels. They compared this with 28% of the comparison groups that met these same criteria. And concluded that about 30% of the RR groups would have reached their criteria level without the intervention. They argued that the efficiency of the intervention was low because selection procedures identify a large number of students for service who would have made adequate progress without the intervention.

Chapman et al. (2001) Used a longitudinal cohort analysis to examine the effectiveness of RR intervention. They reported data collected at five points across the first 2.5 years of school for a cohort of 152 students from 16 New Zealand primary schools. RR students showed no progress relative to a poor reader comparison groups on any measures of phonological processing, word recognition, or reading comprehension. An increased gap in reading self-concept measures relative to all high- performing comparison group. Reading age norms showed performance below norm-based expectations for the RR students and the poor reader comparison groups.

Comparisons Of the three studies two show the RR is successful. One suggests that it is not long term. Objective critics acknowledge that RR works.

Does RR work? After reading the results, you decide. Does it work? Does it hurt to have this individualized intervention? Depending on who does the analyzing, it is hard to decide. Does RR work or not?

References: References Center, Y., Wheldall, K., Freeman, L., Outhred, L., & McNaught, M. (1995). An Experimental Evaluation of Reading Recovery. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, Clay, M. (1985). The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing. Iversen, & Tummer, W. E. (1993). Phonological processing Skills and the Reading Recovery Program. Journal Educational Psychology, 85,

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