Programs that Work

Reading Recovery

Program Info

Outcome Areas

Children Succeeding in School

Indicators

Students performing at grade level or meeting state curriculum standards

Topic Areas

     Age of Child
       Early Childhood
     Type of Setting
       Elementary School
     Type of Service
       Instructional Support
     Type of Outcome Improved
       Cognitive Development / School Performance

Evidence Level (What does this mean?)

Promising

Program Overview

The Reading Recovery (RR) program is an early intervention program designed to help first-grade children who are having difficulty learning to read and write. Developed in 1976 in New Zealand and introduced in the United States in 1984, the program has three main components. The first is a diagnostic survey, which is used in conjunction with teacher evaluations to identify at-risk children. The second is a tutoring session. Each child works with a specially trained teacher for 30 minutes each day until the student’s reading performance level reaches the average level of his or her class. Once students reach this level, they are "discontinued" from the program, typically after 12 to 20 weeks. The third component is the teacher and teacher leader training. The year-long training focuses on analyzing children’s reading and writing behaviors and relating those behaviors to more general theories of literacy and learning. Reading Recovery is also available in a Spanish version, known as Descubriendo la Lectura.

Program Participants

Reading Recovery is designed for first grade beginning readers who are having trouble learning to read and write. This program has generally been targeted at first graders who fall in the lowest 20 percent in reading assessments.

The evaluations and pilot programs have occurred in schools across the country with diverse populations. Most of the schools had Title 1 reading programs in place prior to the start of the Reading Recovery program. (Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA] provides federal funds to high-poverty schools to improve instructional programs.)

In the 2000-2001 academic year, 152,241 first grade children received Reading Recovery and Descubriendo la Lectura lessons. Over 10,000 schools participated with 18,830 RR and Descubriendo la Lectura teachers. RR was offered in schools in 49 states and the Department of Defense Dependents Schools. Since RR began in the United States in 1984, over one million children have been served.

Evaluation Methods

There have been many different evaluations of RR in the United States. Most of them used An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement to assess performance. The Observation Survey consists of a set of six tests: Letter Identification, Word Test, Concepts about Print, Writing Vocabulary, Dictation, and Text Readings. Another common measure used to measure performance is the text reading level, which identifies 26 different reading levels. This scale was designed by B. Peterson in 1991 and described in Bridges to literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery.

A group at Ohio State University (Pinnell, 1989) evaluated two cohorts of students. The first cohort was in a pilot program and the second participated in a full implementation of RR. The full study involved 32 teachers at 12 Columbus, Ohio, schools who had voluntarily joined the project. Classes taught by teachers familiar with the RR program were identified as "program" classrooms. All others were labeled "regular" classrooms. The lowest-performing 20 percent of children in the program classrooms were placed in RR, while similar children in the regular classroom were randomly assigned to either RR or an alternative program. Children were evaluated with the Observation Survey.

In a follow-up study, Pinnell et al. (1994) compared RR with several other reading programs. The study involved 403 students from two rural, two suburban, and six urban school districts. One school in each district already had RR and therefore was designated as the RR site. Three other schools were randomly assigned to another treatment program. In every school, the ten lowest-scoring students were identified. Four students were randomly assigned to the treatment at that school while the rest were assigned to control group. Pre-test data were collected from a dictation task, text reading-level assessment, and the Mason Early Reading Test. After the tutorial programs ended in February, students were assessed with a dictation measure, a text reading-level measure, the Woodcock Reading Mastery test, and the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. The Gates-MacGinitie test was re-administered in May at the end of the school year. Finally, students were assessed the following October with the dictation task and text reading-level measures.

In a similar study, Iverson and Tunmer (1993) compared RR with a modified version that added explicit training in phonological recoding skills -- the ability to translate letters and letter patterns into the sounds of language. At-risk students were drawn from 30 Rhode Island schools and were formed into three matched groups of 32 children each. One group received the standard RR program, the second received the modified RR program, and the third received the standard intervention available to at-risk readers at that school. Children were assessed using the Observation Survey, the Dolch Word Recognition Test, two phonological awareness tests, and a test of psuedo-word decoding. In the pseudo-word decoding task, children were given 40 single-syllable nonsense words and asked to read them aloud. This task was designed to specifically measure the child’s phonological recoding skills.

Key Evaluation Findings

Pinnell (1989) found that in the full Ohio program

RR children from program classrooms scored significantly better than comparison children on all six diagnostic measures
on the text reading measures, RR children scored significantly higher than control children (19.70 compared to 16.71 out of 26 levels) two years after the program ended.

Pinnell et al. (1994) found that

compared with the control group, Reading Recovery students had significantly higher scores on the February dictation and text reading-level assessments.
compared with the control group, Reading Recovery students had a text reading-level assessment that was 0.75 levels (out of 26) higher the following October.
none of the groups showed significant differences on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test given in May.

The Iverson and Tunmer (1993) study found that

children in the modified and standard RR programs scored significantly higher on all diagnostic measures at discontinuation
children in the modified RR program were "discontinued" (that is, their reading level reached the class average reading level) at a significantly earlier rate (after 41.75 lessons) than regular RR children (an average of 57.31 lessons)
at the end of the year, modified RR students scored significantly higher on text reading-level tests than the regular RR students. In all other diagnostic tests, there were no significant differences between the two groups.

Probable Implementers

School educators, administrators, and school district personnel

Funding

Reading Recovery programs are funded by federal dollars as part of the Title I Reading program, from other ESEA titles (professional development, migrant children, English language learners, and others), and from the budgets of state and local school systems. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation also funded implementation of the first statewide RR program in Ohio.

Implementation Detail

Program Design

Early intervention supplement regular reading instruction in the first grade
One-on-one tutoring that adjusts to each child’s individual needs
Tutorials combining both reading and writing exercises
Ongoing training and teacher support

Curriculum
While lessons are individually crafted for each child, tutorial sessions typically include six activities. First, the child reads some familiar books. Second, he or she reads the previous day’s new text. Third, there are some letter identification and/or word-making and word-breaking exercises. Fourth, the child composes a message or story. Fifth, the child reconstructs a cut-up story. Finally, the child reads a new text. Throughout the session, the teacher keeps a running record of the child’s performance, which is used in creating the next day’s lesson.

Staffing
There are two levels of staffing in the RR program, teachers and teacher leaders. Teacher leaders go through a full year of training at a center recognized by the North American Reading Recovery Trainers Group. The courses cover RR procedures, theory, and management. Regular RR teachers also commit to a year long training commitment, which is led by a certified teacher leader. The course uses clinical and peer-critiquing experiences to develop the skills necessary for RR. For example, during most of the weekly sessions the teachers take turns instructing students. While one teacher instructs a student, the rest observe on the other side of a one-way mirror, followed by an analysis of the lesson.

Issues to Consider

This program received a "promising" rating. While the program did show significant gains in several measures, there are a couple of areas of weakness. First, the evaluations often looked only at the results of children who were successfully "discontinued" from the program. There were also children who were served by the program but who were eventually removed because of absences, transfers, or other problems. Some children also went through the entire program but were still not reading at an average level after 60 lessons, the number of lessons given by the Ohio study. Excluding these latter two groups biases the results in favor of RR. A review of several evaluations found that 20 to 30 percent of students fall into these two categories (Shanahan and Barr, 1995). Furthermore, another evaluation stated that all of the students who were not discontinued in the second Ohio cohort were reading below average class level in the third grade (Wasik and Slavin, 1993).

Second, almost all the evaluations used measures that were designed by the individuals who developed the program. There is also some evidence that a relationship exists between the measures that were used and the program itself, suggesting that what is taught is what gets measured (Shanahan and Barr, 1995). The 1994 Pinnell study did use a standardized test at the end of the first grade, but this measure showed no significant difference between RR children and the comparison group.

Finally, the Iverson and Tunmer (1993) evaluation gave some evidence that the program could be improved through the addition of phonetic instruction. They found that not only did students require far fewer lessons, all of the students were successfully discontinued. The Reading Recovery Council of North America notes that Reading Recovery has since incorporated substantial changes related to phonetic instruction, although we have not reviewed any evaluations of these changes.

Example Sites

The program was first fully implemented in the United States at several schools in Columbus, Ohio, and then expanded statewide. Since 1984, the program has been implemented in 49 states, the District of Columbia, four Canadian provinces, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Contact Information

Jean F. Bussell, Ph. D., CAE
Executive Director
Reading Recovery Council of North America
1929 Kenny Road, Suite 100
Columbus, OH 43210-1069
614-292-7111
Fax: 614-292-4404
E-mail: jbussell@readingrecovery.org
www.readingrecovery.org

Available Resources

A nonprofit organizing body, The Reading Recovery Council, manages the Reading Recovery program and its implementation. The Reading Recovery Council offers program materials in English and Spanish, as well as staff training and technical assistance.

The Reading Recovery Council can be contacted at:

Reading Recovery Council of North America
1929 Kenny Rd., Suite 100
Columbus, OH 43210
614-292-7111
Fax: 614-292-4404
E-mail: Marsha Studebaker at mstudebaker@readingrecovery.org

The National Data Evaluation Center (NDEC) provides national reports on data collected and analyzed by the Center. NDEC can be contacted at:

The Ohio State University
National Data Evaluation Center
807 Kinnear Road
Columbus, OH 43212
http://www.ndec.us/

The Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education has a Web site with an overview of RR at http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/readrec.html

A review of several reading programs can be found in Wasik, B. A., and R. E. Slavin, "Preventing Early Reading Failure with One-To-One Tutoring: A Review of Five Programs," Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1993, pp. 179-200.

A description of the text reading scale can be found in DeFord, D.E., C. A. Lyons, and G. S. Pinnell, editors. Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery. Portsmouth, NH. Hennemann, 1991.

Bibliography

Iverson, J. A., W. E. Tunmer, “Phonological Processing Skills and the Reading Recovery Program,”   Journal of Educational Psychology,   Vol. 85, 1993, pp. 112–125.

Pinnell, G. S., “Reading Recovery: Helping At-Risk Children Learn to Read,”    The Elementary School Journal,   Vol. 90, No. 2, 1989, pp. 161–183.

Pinnell, G. S., C. A. Lyons, D. E. DeFord, A. S. Bryk, and M. Seltzer, “Comparing Instructional Models for the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders,”    Reading Research Quarterly,    Vol. 29, No. 1, 1994, pp. 9–38.

Shanahan, T., and R. Barr, “Reading Recovery: An Independent Evaluation of the Effects of an Early Instructional Intervention for At-Risk Learners,”    Reading Research Quarterly,    Vol. 30, No. 4, 1995, pp. 958–996.

Wasik, B. A., and R. E. Slavin, “Preventing Early Reading Failure with One-To-One Tutoring: A Review of Five Programs,”    Reading Research Quarterly,    Vol. 28, No. 2, 1993, pp. 179–200.

Last Reviewed

July 2002

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