Making the Most of Instructional Time: Teaching Reading at an Accelerated Rate to Students at Risk.

Students who are performing below their grade-level can be considered to be “at risk for school failure. ” These students need to learn at an accelerated rate, that is, faster than national norms to move out of the at risk situation. Direct Instruction is one means of accelerating learning (Carnine, 1988). Reading Mastery, a Direct Instruction program, was used to teach reading to firstand second-grade students at risk. The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised was administered pre and post to determine students’ reading grade level and rate of reading gain prior to and during the implementation of Reading Mastery. The rate of reading gain prior to the implementation of Reading Mastery was compared to the rate of reading gain during the Reading Mastery intervention using a dependent one-tailed t test with Bonferroni corrections for each grade level. A significant difference in rate of gain was found for Total Reading in both grades and for Word Attack in first grade and Word Identification in second grade. Making the most of instructional time means teaching as much as possible in the time students are in school. Maximizing efficient use of instructional time may be the only way to ensure success for some students. In elementary school, this success is largely defined by success in reading (Slavin et al., 1996). Frequently, however, students experience failure in learning to read and, before long, in other subjects that rely on reading (Slavin et al., 1996). Students who are likely to experience such failure often are considered to be at risk. In a review of programs for students identified as at risk, McLaughlin and Vacha (1992) found no clear definition of “at risk. ” Instead, they found that the term is generally used to identify students who are not likely to graduate from high school or who are likely to experience emotional or behavioral problems. Students may be at risk because of “poverty, cultural and language differences, race differences, family and community differences, and schools that do not yet consistently make a difference in these children’s learning” (Stringfield & Hollifield, 1996, p. 1). However, if the term is simply used as a synonym for “racial or cultural minority,” or implies blame of a culture for a student’s struggles in school, then the term is detrimental rather than helpful. We use the term to refer to students who have been achieving less than a year’s academic growth per academic year. They are at risk because they have to achieve more than the average student to catch up and they are likely to fall further and further behind as they go through school (Condon & Blaney, 1995). Journal of Direct Instruction 57 LAURA D. FREDRICK, MARIE C. KEEL, and JOHN H. NEEL; Georgia State University Making the Most of Instructional Time: Teaching Reading at an Accelerated Rate to Students At Risk Journal of Direct Instruction, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 57–63. Address correspondence to Laura D. Fredrick, Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303. Little is done to prepare some students to read before they come to school, and this is what places many students at risk for academic failure. Students who are already behind when they begin first grade will need to achieve more than a year’s worth of reading in a year’s time if they are ever to move out of the at risk situation. These students “constantly face the tyranny of time in trying to catch up with their peers, who continue to advance in their literary development” (Condon & Blaney, 1995, p. 23). If we are to have any hope of meeting the educational needs of students at risk, we must teach them at an accelerated rate so they can catch up with their peers (Carnine, 1988). As soon as students enter school, we must begin this process by teaching them to read. Students who do not begin to read by the middle of first grade are likely to fall further and further behind in school and are thus at greater risk of failing to graduate from high school or of developing behavioral and emotional problems (Honig, 1996; Juel, 1994). Learning to read begins with phonemic awareness, “the ability to reflect explicitly on the sound structure of spoken words” (Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis, 1994, p.41). The importance of phonemic awareness and systematic phonics instruction is well documented in the literature (Adams, 1990; Brown & Felton, 1990; Carnine, 1988; Chall, 1989; Condon & Blaney, 1995; Hatcher et al., 1994; Honig, 1996; Juel, 1994). In a summary of research on early reading instructions, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (1996) emphasized the importance of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, sound-symbol correspondence, and soundspelling relationships. The Center also encouraged extensive practice in using students’ emerging knowledge of sound-symbol relationships to read connected, decodable text. Although these highly decodable texts are initially constrained by the students’ limited knowledge of phonics, the texts become more sophisticated and natural as students become more accomplished readers with greater repertoires of knowledge about sound-symbol decoding. Unfortunately, many of our students are not receiving the systematic reading instruction necessary to become competent readers; instead, their reading instruction is being guided by a Whole Language philosophy. This approach is based on the idea that reading, like basic oral language, is best learned without explicit instruction in fundamental skills. Teachers who follow the Whole Language approach tend to provide classrooms rich in print materials including trade books and good literature and eschew the controlled readers necessary for explicit, systematic reading instruction. Whole Language teachers often read to students who follow along and perhaps eventually begin to read for themselves. Phonemic awareness is typically not specifically developed, nor are decoding skills taught in any explicit, systematic way as such instruction is thought to be unnatural. Instead words are often deciphered by fitting them into the context of the material, and correct reading is judged by whether words make sense in context rather than by whether they match the text. Many students are not able to learn to read without explicit instruction and they quickly fall behind in their reading achievement. This problem then compounds itself as students find themselves increasingly behind their peers. Before long they begin to believe that they cannot learn to read. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Reading Mastery program to determine its effect on the reading growth rates of students at risk whose previous reading instruction had been based on the Whole Language method.