The US Department of Education funded a recent study that looked at the results of intensive reading intervention for children in middle school who were having a great deal of difficulty improving their reading skills. This study, conducted by Education Northwest, looked at how much students’ skills in reading were affected by their participation in one or more skills-focused reading programs. After one year of participation, these students scored higher on the state reading tests than they had before the intervention program. Because the funding was cut for the program after one year (it was supposed to run for three years), researchers could not verify whether this intervention would be able to help the children who were having the most difficulty, those whose reading levels were two grades lower than their peers, but given the positive outcomes of the one-year study, it seems likely that more participation in such programs will lead to more improvement in a student’s reading ability.
The researchers also concluded that it made less of a difference which reading intervention program was used – the important part of the process is getting a child this intervention, having them participate on a regular basis, and giving the teachers the instruction and education they need to effectively lead their students through the intervention program. Because many schools in the United States are struggling with funding, it’s often difficult for school districts to justify the additional expense of these reading intervention programs, no matter how big the benefit to the individual students.
What this means is that if you’re a parent with a child who’s having difficulty reading, it’s important that you do everything you can to help and support them at home as well as at school. By teaching your child to eliminate some of the problems that slow reading down, like subvocalization and backtracking, you’ll help them learn to read faster, and also ensure that they enjoy reading rather than looking at it as a chore. No matter which reading improvement program you use, you can be sure that your child will benefit from regular use of that program, and that will have a major – and positive – impact on how well they do in school, at university, and in their future career.
Read the full study here.
