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Scaling-up Effective Interventions:
Prior Research on the Interventions
The effectiveness of Proactive Reading and Responsive Reading is supported by scientifically based research. The first study that evaluated the two interventions took place in the Houston Independent School District over a two-year period (Mathes et al., 2005). In this study, a total of six schools, six reading intervention teachers, and 300 at-risk first-grade students participated. Students were selected in a two-step process. First, they were screened using the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) at either the end of their kindergarten year or the beginning of their first-grade year, in order to identify those at risk for reading difficulties. Second, the TPRI screening was followed by measures of word reading and an oral reading sample, to be sure that the students identified by the TPRI screen were truly at risk. Once students were identified as at risk for reading difficulties, they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 114 in the Quality Classroom (quality classroom reading instruction with whatever supplemental intervention the schools typically provided, with most students not receiving any supplemental reading intervention); 92 in Proactive Reading (quality classroom reading instruction with the Proactive Reading Intervention); and 92 in Responsive Reading (quality classroom reading instruction with the Responsive Reading Intervention).
Students who received the Proactive or Responsive interventions were tutored in small groups with a ratio of 3 students to 1 teacher. They met five days per week for 40 minutes each day from October through May. Student progress was measured using several standardized tests, including the TPRI, the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Awareness (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999), the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1999), and the Woodcock-Johnson III (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). Students’ oral reading fluency was also monitored, and progress reports including graphs showing each student’s progress in oral reading fluency were distributed to the students’ classroom teachers and their parents or guardians.
The results of the study were significant. The findings showed strong differences in the performance of students in both intervention groups as compared with the students who received only Enhanced Classroom instruction. Students who had received Proactive or Responsive Reading intervention performed significantly higher than the Enhanced Classroom group in multiple key reading components, including phonological awareness, word reading ability, oral reading fluency, and spelling.
The results strongly suggest that the two interventions were equally effective, except that students who received Proactive Reading performed significantly higher on nonword decoding. This led the researchers to ask whether certain child characteristics predicted whether students would respond better to one type of reading intervention that the other, but findings suggest that there were not characteristics that aided in the prediction of child response to a particular intervention. These findings indicate that classroom instruction alone, even with high-quality instruction, is not enough for a small number of children who require instruction of higher intensity. Finally, the study findings argue that there is not one “best” approach to reading instruction and that it is also not the case that “anything goes.” Rather, an explicit and systematic approach to reading intervention is the best path. In this study, the focus was particularly on a systematic approach to explicit instruction in phonics and sounding-out reading strategies that complemented other quality reading instruction strategies for at-risk first-grade readers.
Reference
Mathes, P. G., Denton, C. A., Fletcher, J. M., Anthony, J. L., Francis, D. J., & Schnatschneider, C. (2005). The effects of theoretically different instruction and student characteristics on the skills of struggling readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 40, 148–182.