International and national data continue to identify poor literacy standards among secondary school students. The researchers, in collaboration with a metropolitan secondary school in Perth, Western Australia, elected to use the Direct Instruction Reading Mastery program to improve students' reading skills. Data on reading performance was…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery (RR) teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact and sustainability of successfully discontinued first grade Reading Recovery students as compared to non-Reading Recovery students in reading achievement measures as third graders. Schools are facing the unprecedented challenge to ensure reading success for all students by the end of second…

A randomized field trial involving 883 students at 23 schools in three urban cities assessed the effectiveness of Experience Corps[R] (EC), a program that places older adult volunteers in elementary schools to tutor students who are poor readers. Students were assessed at the beginning and end of the academic year with standardized reading…

This study examined the effects of online reading instruction for at-risk fourth-grade students in Philadelphia. The authors used a multiple baseline design to assess the extent to which the students increased their oral reading rate given systematic supplemental online reading instruction. Tutoring consisted of 4 sessions per week with 50-min…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the implementation of a Response to Intervention framework had a positive impact on student reading achievement in urban elementary schools. This was a causal-comparative study that examined the reading performance of a sample of kindergarten through grade three students who experienced the Response to…

"Reading Recovery"[R] is a short-term tutoring intervention designed to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of "Reading Recovery"[R] include: promoting literacy skills; reducing the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read; and preventing long-term reading difficulties. The…

This article describes the implementation of small-group reading instruction as secondary- and tertiary-level components of a three-tier model of prevention and intervention. The study consisted of 83 students who were targeted in the winter of kindergarten as being at high risk for reading failure. Intervention consisted of evidence-based…

The article presents a model of an effectively implemented visual phonics intervention program for kindergarten children at high risk for reading failure in a general education classroom. There is a growing body of professional literature documenting the effectiveness of visual phonics for children who are hard-of-hearing or deaf. There is little…

The purpose of this study was to determine if phonemic awareness skills improved for first grade students classified as at-risk whose teachers used the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LiPS; Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998). Students' scores on a Kindergarten screening tool (Learning Disabilities Working Committee-LDWC, 2005) were compared to…

There is a recent interest in volunteer tutoring programs and research has suggested effectiveness in improving reading skills. Previous research found that the Help One Student to Succeed (HOSTS) volunteer tutoring program increased reading fluency and comprehension over a 5-month interval (Burns, Senesac, & Symington, 2004). The current…

The ability to read is essential to school-based learning and skilled responding in an information rich society. Unfortunately, many students in today's schools do not become skilled readers. Many reading researchers (Blachman 1996, 1997; Felton, 1993; Fletcher & Lyon, 1998; Torgesen, 1997) agree that the vast majority of problems experienced…

The aim of the research reported here was to investigate why a percentage of students experience continued difficulty in literacy learning while participating in Reading Recovery. It was hypothesized that this is to do with particular aspects of teacher-learner interactions. Accordingly the study used ethnographic methodology to describe…

Start Making a Reader Today[R] (SMART[R]) is a volunteer tutoring program widely implemented in Oregon for students in grades K-2 who are at risk of reading failure. The program is designed to be a low-cost, easy-to-implement intervention. Volunteer tutors go into schools where at least 40% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch…

This study reports the results of a peer-mediated intervention, total class peer tutoring, on the academic performance of six urban students at risk for reading failure. A multiple baseline design across subjects was used to evaluate the effects of this intervention. The results showed that five of the six students significantly increased their…