Promising results for Reading Recovery in i3 study

A recent report published by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) evaluates the scale-up of the Reading Recovery program in U.S. schools. Reading Recovery is a short-term intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving first graders increase their reading level.

In 2010 the Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) fund awarded a grant to expand the use of Reading Recovery by training 3,675 new Reading Recovery teachers with the capacity to reach an additional 88,200 children. The evaluation is taking place over five years, and this report, the first of three, presents results from the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years.

The authors found that children randomly assigned to Reading Recovery outperformed those in the control group on each subscale of a standardized assessment of reading achievement (Iowa Tests of Basic Skills - ITBS). The mean of Reading Recovery children's posttest ITBS Total Reading scores was at the 36th percentile nationally, while those in the control group had posttest scores at the 18th percentile - a difference of +18 percentile points. The authors note that Reading Recovery training and implementation were done with high fidelity in schools participating in the scale-up.

Johns Hopkins University 

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