http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/2017/ ... ref=tw&m=1
This week’s challenging question:
I had a question from some schools people that I’m not sure how to answer. I wonder if anyone has data on what progress can be expected of students in the primary grades getting extra help in reading.
Let’s assume that the students are getting good/appropriate instruction, and the data were showing that 44% of students (originally assessed as “far below”) across grades 1-3 were on pace to be on grade level after 2 years of this extra help.
Is this expected progress for such students or less than what has been shown for effective early reading interventions?
Shanahan’s answer:
This is a very complicated question. No wonder the field has largely ducked it. Research is very clear that amount of instruction matters in achievement (e.g., Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010), and there are scads of studies showing that various ways of increasing the amount of teaching can have a positive impact on learning (e.g., preschool, full-day kindergarten, afterschool programs, summer school programs).
Although many think that within-the-school-day interventions are effective because the intervention teachers are better or the methodology is different, but there is good reason to think that the effects are mediated by the amount of additional teaching that the interventions represent. (Title I programs have been effective when delivered after school and summer, but not so much with the daytime within school (Weiss, Little, Bouffard, Deschenes, & Malone, 2009); there are concerns about RtI programs providing interventions during reading instruction instead of in addition to it (Balu, Zhu Doolittle, Schiller, Jenkins, & Gersten, 2015)).
Research overwhelmingly has found that a wide-range of reading interventions work—that is the kids taught by them outperform similar control group kids on some measure or other—but such research has been silent about the size of gains that teachers can expect from them (e.g., Johnson & Allington, 1991). There are many reasons for such neglect: