More evidence for Reading Recovery 

A Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) five-year evaluation of the Reading Recovery program reports "significant positive impacts" in its second year.
 
Reading Recovery aims to help raise literacy standards among the lowest-achieving first graders. Students who receive Reading Recovery meet individually for 30 minutes with a trained Reading Recovery teacher every school day for 12 to 20 weeks.

The evaluation covered a period when the program increased in size with 2,079 new teachers recruited and trained, an additional 23,720 students receiving one-to-one lessons with a trained teacher in the program, and an additional 113,976 students receiving classroom or small-group instruction.

Key findings from the study included:

• Students in the Reading Recovery program outperformed those in the control group in all subscales of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) by 14 to 16 percentile points.
• Large effect sizes of 0.42 standard deviations compared with other children eligible for Reading Recovery and 0.33 standard deviations compared with the national population of first graders.
• Students in Reading Recovery exceeded expected improvement by an equivalent of an additional 1.4 months compared with the ITBS test's national norming sample - a large effect in the context of studies on instructional interventions.

Johns Hopkins University 

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