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Abstract
In this study, students and their teachers participated in a layered approach to reading intervention in kindergarten through third grade that included professional development for teachers in scientifically based reading instruction, ongoing measurement of reading progress, and additional small-group or individual instruction for students whose progress was insufficient to maintain grade-level reading achievement. Reading outcomes were compared with historical control groups of students in the same schools. The findings revealed overall improvements in reading, improved reading for students who began the study in high-risk categories, and decreases in the incidence of reading disability at the end of third grade. Implications for scaling up are discussed.
Early intervention in reading has garnered national attention through the Reading First Initiative (RFI) of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; 2002), which sets goals for improving reading performance in schools where students have shown limited success in the acquisition of basic literacy by the end of third grade. These goals stem from theories in which skilled reading can be traced back in time (Ehri & McCormick, 1998; Gough & Walsh, 1991; Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1994) to earlier understandings about print and its relationship to spoken words (i.e., phonemic awareness, or the ability to apprehend and manipulate the sounds in spoken words), about the development of automaticity (i.e., that early skills, such as recognizing words in print, should be speeded up or made automatic), and about the ways in which comprehension of spoken language can be applied to comprehension of written language (e.g., meanings of words, syntax, application of background knowledge). This notion of reading development opens the possibility that reading problems could be diminished if individual differences in skill development were addressed at the time they are first noticed, rather than waiting for these differences to become pronounced.
In essence, the rationale behind most early intervention efforts is to encourage at-risk children to learn the earlier understandings about sounds in words and features of print within the windows in time that these understandings develop for typically achieving children. In this view, if by the end of kindergarten all children could blend and segment spoken words (phonemic awareness) and link these speech sounds to letter sounds (the alphabetic principle),...