Year Two randomized evaluation of Chapter One literacy tutoring

By Cynthia Lake, Johns Hopkins University

The National Student Support Accelerator has released a report on the impact of the second year of a randomized controlled trial of Chapter One, an early reading tutoring program that places part-time tutors in the classroom to work individually with students in short bursts of instruction for the entire school year. The study was conducted during the 2021-2022 school year with kindergarten students and continued in 2022-2023 with first grade students from 13 schools in a large Southeastern school district. In study year one, 50% of the students within 49 kindergarten classrooms were randomly assigned to receive Chapter One and 50% to a business-as-usual control group (N = 420, 398 respectively). Results at the end of kindergarten were positive, with Chapter One students performing higher on measures of oral fluency and on the district reading assessment.

The second year of the study continued with first grade students who remained in the same schools. Due to attrition, nearly one-third of the original Chapter One sample did not receive tutoring in year 2. The tutors primarily worked with students with lower reading skills, but all the students assigned to Chapter One received some tutoring. The positive effects of the program were observed not only in program-collected measures of Reading Stages and Oral Reading Fluency but also on the STAR Early Literacy Assessment, the district measure of early literacy skills. By the end of first grade, students receiving Chapter One tutoring scored significantly higher on the oral reading fluency assessment than did students in the control group (ES = +0.35). Additionally, students receiving Chapter One tutoring were nine percentage points less likely to be categorized as at-risk in early literacy than the control group students (45 vs 54 percent).

While the effectiveness of high-impact tutoring has been well-documented, these programs can be challenging to scale and require substantial resources. Chapter One, with its focus on affordability and sustainability, shows promising evidence of a scalable approach for delivering one-on-one personalized literacy tutoring.