B. Evidence of Links between Research and Program Design

 

Reading comprehension for adolescents is a tremendously pressing problem.  According to the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), twenty six percent of eighth graders cannot read at the basic level; and on the 2002 NAEP (the most recent assessment for twelfth graders) twenty-six percent of twelfth graders cannot read at the basic level.

            This data becomes even more troubling when it is disaggregated by race.  Nationwide assessments of reading skills show the average Black or Latino student graduating from high school with skills equivalent to the average white or Asian eighth grader (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 13).    This comes in spite of billions of dollars specifically targeting the reading skills of at-risk adolescents through Title One pull-out programs.

Reading, MD’s  potential in bridging this achievement gap one reader at a time grounded in a host of research showing that that while “much of the instruction” targeted at at-risk students “has been and continues to be ineffective,” “one noteworthy reform” has been “a tradition of service delivery built around one-to-one reading instruction with trained tutors” (Farkas (1998), pg 75).

While there has been very little systematic study of one-to one reading interventions at the middle and secondary level, those (very few) studies that have been done on one-on-one reading tutoring for adolescents have shown remarkably positive effects.  When James Shaver worked with Logan-Cache School District on a tutorial program for underachieving 4th, 7th, and 10th grade readers, he found “that tutoring had a statistically significant effect on the students and that the effect was increasingly greater from the fourth to the seventh to the tenth grade” (Shaver (1969), pg 3).  More recently, a DOE dissemination grant application by Michael Goldstein, CEO of The MATCH School, strongly suggested that one-on-one tutoring was to credit for the significant MCAS gains of MATCH students from the 8th to the 10th grade. 

Compared against district public schools, MATCH was #12 out of 176 Massachusetts high schools in gains over baseline in ELA.  In math, MATCH was #1 out of 176 in gains over baseline.  These gains are so significant that we believe that the improvement is at least partially attributable to high dosage of tutoring.   -Goldstein (2003), pg 1

 

In addition to a program design (one-on-one tutoring) that is research-based, City on a Hill’s Reading, MD program is founded upon up-to-date research on adolescent reading development.  To begin with, Reading, MD tailors a lesson plan to each student based upon where they stand in the stages of reading development as originally outlined by Jeanne Chall and subsequently summarized by Mary E. Curtis in When Adolescents Can’t Read: Methods and Materials that Work.  Curtis notes that “as children learn to read they go through several distinct stages of reading development” (Curtis 8).  She lists six stages of development that span from birth to adulthood, but because our students are all adolescents, we have simplified these stages for our purposes into three: students who struggle with word recognition, students who recognize words but struggle with comprehension, and students who comprehend but need to read more analytically.  By targeting the area that is most seriously handicapping a student’s progress, Reading, MD enhances “the knowledge and skills that are most critical for moving them to their next stage of reading development,” just as Chall recommended (Curtis 11).

            After a student’s skill level has been determined, he or she is given research-based lessons to improve his or her area of greatest need, which is normally one of the following: word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension, or literary analysis.  During a two hour tutoring session, fifty minutes are spent on such exercises and on related writing assignments, which are selected by the tutor from a list of recommended techniques.  Recommended exercises in word recognition, or phonics, include syllable blending, repetition of flash cards with frequently missed or common words, creation of pseudo words to practice pronunciation, rhyming to practice word recall, placing confusing words in new contexts, and more.  The National Reading Panel’s findings, as published in Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups, verify the effectiveness of such instruction.  The Panel studied programs – ranging in size from individual tutoring to small groups to classrooms - that concentrate on phonic development and found that “tutoring produced an effect size of d = 0.57 which was greater than the effect size for small groups, d = 0.43, and for classrooms, d = 0.39” (NRP 2-120).  Furthermore, the panel found that phonic instruction is even effective for older students, which for their purposes meant students above first grade: “substantial growth occurred in learning to decode regularly spelled words (d = 0.49) and pseudo words (d = 0.52), with effect sizes statistically greater than zero in the moderate range.  This shows that phonics programs were significantly more effective than control programs in improving these students’ knowledge and use of the alphabetic system” (NRP 2-116).  Phonics instruction has therefore been proven to be an effective way for struggling readers to progress to the next stage of their reading development

            Reading, MD engages in all categories of vocabulary instruction defined by the National Reading Panel: explicit instruction (students look up and study unknown words found in assigned readings), indirect instruction (students are exposed to new material at each session), multimedia methods (students find examples of words in other contexts such as movies or music), capacity methods (students practice and strengthen other cognitive abilities through frequent reading), and association methods (students relate words to events in their lives or create stories using the words).  Reading, MD thus follows almost all of the National Reading Panel’s recommendations for vocabulary instruction (as listed on page 4-27 of the Report of the Subgroups) and especially its most general piece of advice, that “Dependence on a single vocabulary instruction method will not result in optimal learning” (NRP 4-27).  Reading, MD seeks optimal learning through the comprehensive nature of its vocabulary development practice.

            Equally comprehensive is our practice regarding text comprehension.  Of the eight effective methods for comprehension instruction listed by the National Reading Panel, Reading, MD utilizes seven: comprehension monitoring, graphic and semantic organizers, story structures, question answering, question generation, summarization, and multiple strategy teaching.  The last method results from our combination of the previous six and is particularly notable since the Panel determined that “The empirical evidence reviewed favors the conclusion that teaching of a variety of reading comprehension strategies leads to increased learning of the strategies, to specific transfer of learning, to increased retention and understanding of new passages, and, in some cases, to general improvements in comprehension” (NRP 4-6).  Our one-to-one tutoring environment allows individual tutors to experiment with different instructional methods in all areas – phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension – in order to find the mix of lessons that best suits their students.

            While considerable attention is paid to lessons designed specifically to target a student’s weakest area, the heart of the Reading, MD lesson plan calls for the student to read, sometimes orally, sometimes silently, and discuss with the tutor what he or she has read.  This foundation is based on the conclusion reached by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement that “Repeated and monitored oral reading improves fluency and overall reading achievement” (CIERA, 24).  The National Reading Panel echoes this assertion, saying, “An extensive review of the literature indicates that classroom practices that encourage repeated oral reading with feedback and guidance leads to meaningful improvements in reading expertise for students—for good readers as well as those who are experiencing difficulties” (NRP 3-3).  For this reason, a Reading, MD student will spend at least sixty minutes of a two hour tutoring session somehow engaged in a text – either reading it orally or silently or discussing it with his or her tutor. 


 

Question B

1.                  Curtis, Mary E. When Adolescents Can’t Read: Methods and Materials That Work. Newton, MA: Brookline Books, 1999.

2.                  Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement. Put Reading First: The Research Building Block for Teaching Children to Read. September, 2001.

3.                   Farkas, George (1998).  “Reading One-to-One: An Intensive Program Serving a Great Many Students While Still Achieving Large Effects.”  In J. Crane (ed), Social Programs that Work.  New York, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 75-109.

4.                  Goldstein, Michael (2003).  “Disseminating Grant: Does Tutoring Affect MCAS Scores?” < http://www.matchschool.org/Academics/tutoring/Disseminating_Grant_Does_tutoring_affect_MCAS_scores.doc>. Date viewed: July 17, 2005.

5.                  National Reading Panel. Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction: Reports of the Subgroups. < http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.pdf>.  Date viewed: March 28, 2005.

6.                  Shaver, James P., (1969).  “Tutorial Students Two Years Later: A Report on the Logan-Cache Tutorial Center for Underachieving Readers and Writers.  Submitted to the Utah State Department of Public Instruction, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1-36.

7.                   Shaver, J.P. and Nuhn, D. (1971).  The Effectiveness of Tutoring Underachievers in Reading and Writing.  Journal of Educational Research, 65, 107-112.

8.                   Thernstrom, A. and Thernstrom, S. 2003.  No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

9.                   Wasik, B. and Slavin, R. E. (1993) Preventing Early Reading Failure with One-to-One Tutoring: A Review of Five Programs.  Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 178-200.