A Descriptive Study Of Title I Remedial Reading Programs In North Dakota Public Schools

Author : Joseph Torgesen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (16 download)

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Download or read book National Assessment of Title I. Final Report. Volume II: Closing the Reading Gap written by Joseph Torgesen and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume report, and Summary of Key Findings, presents findings from the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Title I on the implementation and impact of the program. Volume I [see ED499017] contains key findings on the implementation of the program under No Child Left Behind, and Volume II presents a report on follow-up findings from Closing the Reading Gap, an evaluation of the impact of supplemental remedial reading programs on achievement of 3rd and 5th grade students. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (U.S. Department of Education 2006), 36 percent of fourth graders read below the basic level. Such literacy problems can worsen as students advance through school and are exposed to progressively more complex concepts and courses. The nation's 16,000 school districts are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on educational products and services developed by textbook publishers, commercial providers, and nonprofit organizations, yet little is known about the effectiveness of these interventions. To help shed light on their effectiveness, the authors of the present volume initiated an evaluation of either parts or all of four widely used programs for elementary school students with reading problems. The programs are Corrective Reading, Failure Free Reading, Spell Read P.A.T., and Wilson Reading, all of which would be more intensive and skillfully delivered than the programs typically provided in public schools. The programs incorporate explicit and systematic instruction in the basic reading skills in which struggling readers are frequently deficient. This study is a large-scale, longitudinal evaluation comprising two main elements. The first element of the evaluation is an impact study designed to determine: (1) the impact of being in any of the four remedial reading interventions, considered as a group, relative to the instruction provided by the schools; (2) whether the impacts of the interventions vary across students with different baseline characteristics; and (3) the extent that the instruction provided in this study close the reading gap and bring struggling readers within the normal range, relative to the instruction provided by their schools. The second element of the evaluation is an implementation study that has two components: (1) an exploration of the similarities and differences in reading instruction offered in the four interventions; and (2) a description of the regular instruction that students in the control group received in the absence of the interventions, and of the regular instruction received by the treatment group beyond the interventions. The evaluation found that the interventions: improved some reading skills; did not improve Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) scores; narrowed some reading gaps; and helped third-graders more than fifth graders, although the interventions did not consistently benefit any one subgroup more than another. The following are appended: (1) Details of Study Design and Implementation; (2) Data Collection; (3) Weighting Adjustments and Missing Data; (4) Details of Statistical Methods; (5) Intervention Impacts on Spelling and Calculation; (6) Instructional Group Clustering; (7) Baseline Characteristics of the PSSA Sample; (8) Impact Estimate Standard Errors, Test Statistics, and P-Values; (9) Estimated R-Squared Values and Intraclass Correlations; (10) Scientific Advisory Board; (11) PSSA Data Collection Form; (12) Sample Test Items; (13) Teacher Survey Form; (14) School Records Form. (Contains 54 footnotes, 28 tables, 1 exhibit, and 30 figures.) [This report was prepared for the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences (IES) by the Corporation for the Advancement of Policy Evaluation. Additional funding of the interventions was provided by: the Barksdale Reading institute; the Haan Foundation for Children; and the Raymond Foundation.].