Early struggling readers and summertime intervention

Early struggling readers and summertime intervention
Kristen Beach and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte examined the effects of receiving a reading program during the summer on the reading achievement of struggling readers in comparison to similarly performing struggling readers who did not receive this summer intervention.
 
Thirty-two rising second and third graders in a large urban school in the southeastern United States comprised the experimental group. To be eligible for the study, students had to score beneath a cutoff point for each grade level on reading fluency. The comparison group was composed of students at a nearby school who were matched by age, ethnicity, and standardized test scores the prior spring. Both schools were Title I schools and both sets of students were African-American and Hispanic, and from low-income backgrounds.
 
Students in the experimental group received 15 intensive hour-long one-to-one or one-to-two sessions from 10 teachers using the Sound Partners program five times a week for three weeks. Posttest scores in the fall showed that although students who received Sound Partners in the summer outscored the control group in overall reading measures by 0.25 SD, gains in fluency were minimal, and no gains in any area were statistically significant. The authors discuss these findings and conclude that for early readers who have not mastered basic decoding and fluency, an intervention that is longer than 15 hours over three weeks is necessary in order to produce significant improvement in reading. They recommend that planners of summer programs aimed at increasing reading achievement carefully consider the variables that will lead to the greatest success.

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