This paper presents evidence confirming the validity of the RD design in the Reading Recovery study by examining the ability of the RD design to replicate the 1st grade results observed in the original i3 RCT focused on short-term impacts. Over 1,800 schools participated in the RD study over all four cohort years. The RD design used cutoff-based…

This report summarizes the results of a cluster-randomized field trial that estimated the effect of "BURST[R]: Reading" on primary grades students' early literacy achievement. BURST is a widely adopted supplemental reading program designed for use with students struggling to acquire early literacy skills and is meant to provide…

The purpose of this report is to present the results of a two-year randomized control trial evaluation of the SPARK literacy program. SPARK is an early grade literacy program developed by Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee. In 2010, SPARK was awarded an Investing in Innovation (i3) Department of Education grant to further develop the…

Accelerated Reader™ is a computerized supplementary reading program that provides guided reading instruction to students in grades K-12. It aims to improve students' reading skills through reading practice and by providing frequent feedback on students' progress to teachers. The Accelerated Reader™ program requires students to select and read a…

This study employs a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) design to develop an adaptive intervention with personalized print and digital content for kindergarten to Grade 2 children (n = 273). In Stage 1, we ask whether it is better for children to receive an adaptive intervention based on (a) 10 conceptually coherent texts or…

This study evaluates the impacts and costs of the Reading Partners program, which uses community volunteers to provide one-on-one tutoring to struggling readers in under-resourced elementary schools. The evaluation uses an experimental design. Students were randomly assigned within 19 different Reading Partners sites to a program or control…

To improve the reading comprehension outcomes of children in high-poverty schools, policymakers need to identify reading interventions that show promise of effectiveness at scale. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a low-cost and large-scale summer reading intervention that provided comprehension lessons at the end of the school year and…

As part of the 2010 economic stimulus, a $55 million "Investing in Innovation" (i3) grant from the US Department of Education was awarded to scale up Reading Recovery across the nation. This paper presents the final round of results from the large-scale, mixed methods randomized evaluation of the implementation and impacts of Reading…

Interest in variation in program impacts--How big is it? What might explain it?--has inspired recent work on the analysis of data from multi-site experiments. One critical aspect of this problem involves the use of random or fixed effect estimates to visualize the distribution of impact estimates across a sample of sites. Unfortunately, unless the…

The current article examines what factors explained the success of a reading program delivered by older adult volunteers to at-risk early readers. The article also examines the direction of the relationship over time (both direct and mediated) between reading achievement, frequency of reading at home, and academic self-beliefs. Two hundred and…

Achieve3000 publishes a number of online literacy programs that differentiate lessons and activities based on student performance. Magnolia Consulting--an independent, third party evaluation firm--assessed Achieve3000 Solutions' impact on student learning during the 2014-15 school year. The researchers used a randomized control trial, where…