A School District Comparison of Reading Achievement Based on Three Reading Programs.

This study compared the reading achievement levels of 323 third grade students from a Caribbean school district receiving instruction from three different programs. Students were identified as at risk with a 95% minority enrollment, 100% free lunch and transportation, and the lowest NAEP test scores in the nation. Total standardized test scores from the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT)-Expanded Edition were compared according to instructional methods. The results of an ANOVA showed significant differences. Statistically, the Success for All Group achieved the highest mean score, while there were no significant differences in the mean scores between the Direct Instruction Group and the Basal Reader Group. The importance of this study lies in its effort to analyze available data on three modes of reading instruction. The school district should select one reading program and institute it districtwide after longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data are collected. This study is only the first step in that direction. 1 The many factors that place young children at risk educationally include poverty, language barriers, learning disabilities, minority ethnic group membership, or a combination of such factors (baas, 1991). As a result, “the challenge for educational researchers and practitioners is to identify practical and effective means of reducing such students’ chances of academic failure, grade retention, and dropping out of school at an early age” (ross, Smith, Slavin, & madden, 1997, p. 171). As englemann (1999) reported, school failure for at-risk students results largely from the fact that all children are expected to learn a specified battery of skills in a specified number of years. This comparison may be unfair for at-risk children because they may take longer to master those skills. They enter first grade substantially behind in reading, language, and number skills (p. 77). Failure to develop reading skills during the primary school years intensifies as the student progresses through the grades. Juel (1988) reported that approximately 88% of first-grade students whose performance scores were in the lowest quartile in reading comprehension remained at performance levels below the 50th percentile through the fourth grade. Similar findings reported by others indicate that “students who have been poor readers in the early elementary years remain poor readers throughout school” (Carlson & Francis, 2002, p. 142). The Comprehensive School reform movement (CSrm) promotes the idea that student achievement occurs most frequently when there is an intensive effort to make positive, academicallyfocused, schoolwide changes. Those “students in schools working with whole-school reform tended to achieve greater gains than students in schools attempting various pull-out programs” (Wested, 2003, p. 5). However, in spite of the promise shown by these programs, educators continue to be puzzled by the large number of children with severe problems in reading. The purpose of the study reported here was to compare the reading standardized achievement test scores of third-grade students who received reading instruction using three different programs: Success for All (SFA), Direct Instruction (DI), and Basal Reader (BR). The backgrounds, advantages, and criticisms of each reading program were also considered. Success for All SFA, a school restructuring program developed by robert Slavin and nancy madden (2000) of Johns Hopkins university, was designed to address the needs of at-risk students in high poverty schools. Key features of the program are (a) a research-based instructional component focused on the development of literacy and oral language skills, (b) cooperative learning, (c) assessment of educational progress every eight weeks, (d) homogeneous ability grouping for reading instruction, (e) one-on-one tutoring, (f) a family support team, and (g) a full-time program facilitator to administer the program. (urdegar, 2000, p. 1) In contrast to traditional strategies, which often emphasized pulling disadvantaged students out of regular classes to receive limited tutoring, SFA was designed as a comprehensive program grounded on two essential principles: prevention and immediate, intensive intervention (Slavin et al., 1996; Slavin, madden, Karweit, Dolan, & Wasik, 1992). SFA proposes that at-risk students are more successful when their academic deficiencies are addressed