Reading Recovery is an example of a widely used early literacy intervention for struggling first-grade readers, with a research base demonstrating evidence of impact. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s i3 program, researchers conducted a 4-year evaluation of the national scale-up of Reading Recovery. The evaluation included an implementation study and a multisite randomized controlled trial with 6,888 participating students in 1,222 schools. The goal of this study was to understand whether the impacts identified in prior rigorous studies of Reading Recovery could be replicated in the context of a national scale-up. The findings of this study reaffirm prior evidence of Reading Recovery’s immediate impacts on student literacy and support the feasibility of successfully scaling up an effective intervention.

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term, one-to-one intervention designed to help the lowest achieving readers in first grade. This article presents firstyear results from the multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) and implementation study under the $55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale-Up Project. For the 2011-2012 school year, the estimated standardized effect of RR on students' Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Total Reading Scores was .69 standard deviations relative to the population of struggling readers eligible for RR under the i3 scale-up and .47 standard deviations relative to the nationwide population of all first graders. School-level implementation of RR was, in most respects, faithful to the RR Standards and Guidelines, and the intensive training provided to new RR teachers was viewed as critical to successful implementation.

Reading Recovery is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a period of 12 to 20 weeks. The purpose of these lessons is to support rapid acceleration of each child's literacy learning. In 2010, The Ohio State University received a Scaling Up What Works grant from the U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund to expand the use of Reading Recovery across the country. The award was intended to fund the training of 3,675 new Reading Recovery teachers in U.S. schools, thereby expanding service to an additional 88,200 students.The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) was contracted to conduct an independent evaluation of the i3 scale-up of Reading Recovery over the course of five years. The evaluation includes parallel rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental designs for estimating program impacts, coupled with a largescale mixed-methods study of program implementation. This report presents the findings of the second year of the evaluation. The primary goals of this evaluation are: a) to provide experimental evidence of the impacts of Reading Recovery on student learning under this scale-up effort ; b) to assess the success of the scale-up in meeting the i3 grant's expansion goals; and c) to document the implementation of the scale-up and fidelity to program standards.This document is the second in a series of three reports based on our external evaluation of the Reading Recovery i3 Scale-Up. This report presents results from the impact and implementation studies conducted over the 2012-2013 school year-the third year of the scale-up effort and the second full year of the evaluation.In order to estimate the impacts of the program, a sample of first graders who had been selected to receive Reading Recovery were randomly assigned to a treatment group that received Reading Recovery immediately, or to a control group that did not receive Reading Recovery until the treatment group had exited the intervention. The reading achievement of students in this sample was assessed using a standardized assessment of reading achievement-the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). The data for the implementation study include extensive interviews and surveys with Reading Recovery teachers, teacher leaders, site coordinators, University Training Center directors, members of the i3 project leadership team at The Ohio State University, and principals and first-grade teachers in schools involved in the scale-up. Case studies were also conducted in nine i3 scale-up schools to observe how Reading Recovery operates in different contexts. Disciplines About the Center for Research in Education & Social Policy (CRESP)The Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP) within the College of Education and Human Development at ...

CPRE released its evaluation of one of the most ambitious and well-documented expansions of a U.S. instructional curriculum. The rigorous independent evaluation of the Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up of Reading Recovery, a literacy intervention for struggling first graders, was a collaboration between CPRE and the Center for Research on Education and Social Policy (CRESP) at the University of Delaware.The CPRE/CRESP evaluation revealed that students who participated in Reading Recovery significantly outperformed students in the control group on measures of overall reading, reading comprehension, and decoding. These effects were similarly large for English language learners and students attending rural schools, which were the student subgroups of priority interest for the i3 scale-up grant program.The study included an in-depth analysis of program implementation. Key findings focus on the contextual factors of the school and teachers that support the program's success and the components of instructional strength in Reading Recovery. Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Methods | Education Policy | Elementary and Middle and Secondary Education Administration | Elementary Education and Teaching | Reading and Language CommentsView on the CPRE website.This report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cpre_researchreports/81 CONSORTIUMforPOLICYR ESEARCHinEDUCATION A R E S E A R C H R E P O R T About the Center for Research in Education & Social Policy (CRESP)The Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP) within the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Delaware conducts rigorous research to help policymakers and practitioners in education, health care and human services determine which policies and programs are most promising for improving outcomes in children, youth, adults and families.Although research in prevention sciences and health care have long used rigorous designs to assess the effectiveness of programs, it was not until the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 that we witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of research to evaluate the effects of education programs and policies. The education community began to focus on research that could measure the impact of these programs through randomized experiments and other research designs that support causal conclusions and can determine whether, how well, for whom, and why new programs and interventions work.CRESP specializes in experimental and quasi-experimental research that uses quantitative and mixed methods to evaluate how and how well programs and interventions work to improve educational, family, and health outcomes in schools and communities.

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