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A popular program for teaching kids to read just took another hit to its credibility

Emily Hanford

Christopher Peak

New research could prompt schools to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery, one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. Gary John Norman/Getty Images hide caption

New research could prompt schools to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery, one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs.

One of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs for young children has taken another hit to its credibility.

Reading Recovery — a one-on-one tutoring program for first graders — has long been controversial because it's based on a theory about how people read that was disproven decades ago by cognitive scientists. A 2019 story by APM Reports helped bring public attention to the fact that reading programs based on this theory teach the strategies struggling readers use to get by. In other words: Children are taught to read the way that poor readers read.

Now, a new, federally funded study has found that, by third and fourth grade, children who received Reading Recovery had lower scores on state reading tests than a comparison group of children who did not receive Reading Recovery.

Why Millions Of Kids Can't Read And What Better Teaching Can Do About It

"It's not what we expected, and it's concerning," said lead author Henry May, director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware. May delivered the findings at an April gathering of education researchers in San Diego.

At least 2.4 million students in the United States have participated in Reading Recovery or its Spanish-language counterpart since 1984, when the program first came to America from New Zealand. The program is also used in Australia, Canada and England, among other countries .

The new research could prompt schools to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery, and consider other ways to help struggling first-graders.

The new research shows children make initial gains, then fall behind

May was the principal investigator of an earlier federally funded study of Reading Recovery, one of the largest ever randomized experiments of an instructional intervention in elementary schools. That study, which began in 2011, found evidence of large positive gains in first grade, as has other research. The program's advocates have pointed to that research as evidence that the instructional approach is effective and based on sound science.

But whether the initial gains last and translate into better performance on state reading tests remained a question. This new study on the long-term impact of Reading Recovery is the largest, most rigorous effort to tackle that question, according to May.

The Gap Between The Science On Kids And Reading, And How It Is Taught

The fact that students who participated in Reading Recovery did worse in later grades than similar students who did not get the program surprised May.

"Was Reading Recovery harmful? I wouldn't go as far as to say that," he said. "But what we do know is that the kids that got it for some reason ended up losing their gains and then falling behind."

In a written response to the study, the Reading Recovery Council of North America, the organization that advocates for the program in the United States, disputed some of the research methodology and maintained that their program is effective. It also said: "Reading Recovery has and will continue to change in response to evidence gathered from a wide range of studies of both students having difficulties with early reading and writing and their teachers."

U.S. schools have been dropping Reading Recovery

At one point, Reading Recovery was in every state. But school districts have been dropping the program – today, it's in nearly 2,000 schools in 41 states, according to the most recent data.

In fact, the first district to implement the program in the U.S. recently decided to stop using it.

Leslie Kelly, executive director of teaching and learning at Columbus City Schools in Ohio, said the decision to drop Reading Recovery is part of a larger effort to bring "the science of reading" to the district. She said she and her colleagues realized that their approach to reading instruction, including Reading Recovery, didn't align well with that science.

Her advice to other districts that are still using Reading Recovery is to take a close look at the program's effectiveness: "Do your research. Read a lot, and really look at do you have evidence of impact? That's really the key. Do you have evidence of impact, and how do you know? And if you don't have evidence of impact, you have to ask yourself why and then what are you going to do about it?"

Reading Recovery was already controversial

Critics of Reading Recovery have long contended that children in the program do not receive enough explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words. In addition, they say, children are taught to use context, pictures and other clues to identify words, a strategy that may work in first-grade books but becomes less effective as text becomes more difficult. They say kids can seem like good readers in first grade but fail to develop the skills they need to be good readers in the long run.

Rethinking How Students With Dyslexia Are Taught To Read

May said this could explain his latest research findings. "If you don't build up those decoding skills, you're going to fall behind, even though it looked like you had caught up in first grade."

He said the results could also be explained by the fact that about 40% of the students who received Reading Recovery got no further intervention after first grade. "Because the kids didn't get the intervention that they needed in second and third grade, they lost those gains," May said. "I think that's a plausible hypothesis."

But the study also found that the students who were in Reading Recovery were more likely than the comparison group to receive extra help for reading after first grade. Advocates for Reading Recovery have justified the program's high cost — estimated to be up to $10,271 per student — by saying that the program reduces the need for further reading intervention.

This new research comes as schools and states are looking for ways to help students recover from the disruptions of the pandemic, including disruptions to their reading development. May's findings are something for policymakers and school leaders to consider as they make decisions about what programs to invest in.

Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and Christopher Peak is a reporter for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative reporting group at American Public Media. This story was adapted from their earlier reporting . A collection of stories from APM Reports on how kids learn to read can be found here.

New research shows controversial Reading Recovery program eventually had a negative impact on children

Initial gains from first-grade intervention didn’t last and kids performed worse in third and fourth grade.

April 23, 2022 | by Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak

One of the world’s most widely used reading intervention programs for young children took a hit to its credibility today following the release of a new study at the American Educational Research Association conference. 

Reading Recovery — a one-on-one tutoring program for first graders — has long been controversial because it’s based on a theory about how people read words that was disproven decades ago by cognitive scientists. A 2019 story by APM Reports helped bring widespread public attention to the fact that reading programs based on this theory teach kids the habits of struggling readers . 

The new, federally funded study found that children who received Reading Recovery had scores on state reading tests in third and fourth grade that were below the test scores of similar children who did not receive Reading Recovery. 

“It's not what we expected, and it's concerning,” said lead author Henry May, director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware, who delivered the findings at the prestigious, annual gathering of education researchers being held this year in San Diego.

The findings could prompt school districts nationwide to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery and consider other ways to help struggling first-graders. 

May was the principal investigator of an earlier federally funded study of Reading Recovery, one of the largest ever randomized experiments of an instructional intervention in elementary schools. That study, which began in 2011, found evidence of large positive gains in first grade, as has other research. The program’s advocates have pointed to that research as evidence that the instructional approach is based on sound science and is effective. 

But whether the initial gains last and translate into better performance on state reading tests remained a question. The new study on the long-term impact of Reading Recovery is the largest, most rigorous effort to tackle that question, according to May. 

The fact that students who participated in Reading Recovery did worse in later grades than similar students who did not get the program surprised May. “Was Reading Recovery harmful? I wouldn't go as far as to say that,” he said. “But what we do know is that the kids that got it for some reason ended up losing their gains and then falling behind.”

At least 2.4 million students in the United States have participated in Reading Recovery or its Spanish-language counterpart since 1984, when the program first came to America from New Zealand. The program is in nearly 2,000 schools in 41 states. 

A spokesperson for the Reading Recovery Council of North America, the organization that advocates for the program in the United States, declined an interview request. In a written response to the study, the organization said: “Reading Recovery has and will continue to change in response to evidence gathered from a wide range of studies of both students having difficulties with early reading and writing and their teachers.” 

Critics of Reading Recovery have long contended that children in the program do not receive enough explicit and systematic instruction in how to decode words. In addition, they say, children are taught to use context, pictures, and other clues to identify words, a strategy that may work in first-grade books but becomes less effective as text becomes more difficult. They say kids can seem like good readers in first grade but fail to develop the skills they need to be good readers in the long run. 

May said this could be what is happening. “If you don't build up those decoding skills, you're going to fall behind, even though it looked like you had caught up in first grade.” 

He said the results could also be explained by the fact that about 40 percent of the students who received Reading Recovery got no further intervention after first grade. “Because the kids didn't get the intervention that they needed in second and third grade, they lost those gains,” May said. “I think that's a plausible hypothesis.” 

But the study also found that the students who were in Reading Recovery were more likely than the comparison group to receive further intervention, which undercuts the program’s claims that children who are successful in the program won’t need further reading intervention. In fact, advocates for Reading Recovery have justified the program’s high cost — estimated to be up to $10,271 per student — by saying that children who are successful in the program won’t need additional help.

Concerns Raised Over Reading Recovery’s Long-Term Effects

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A widely used, and initially successful, intervention for struggling beginning readers may hurt students’ reading growth in the long run, a new study finds.

Reading Recovery was considered one of the breakout stars of the federal Investing in Innovation program, after a massive randomized controlled study found the literacy program helped struggling 1st graders gain significant ground in reading. But new findings from a longitudinal follow-up of the program suggest that by 3rd and 4th grades, former Reading Recovery students performed significantly worse than their peers who did not participate in the program.

The results, presented at last week’s annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, come as districts across the country search for ways to help catch up students who lost ground in reading during the pandemic. One-to-1 interventions like Reading Recovery have shown significant benefits in prior studies, but can be among the most expensive to maintain, both in training and staff time.

Reading Recovery, developed in the 1970s by New Zealand literacy researcher Marie Clay, is now used in Australia, Britain, and the United States as well.

Teachers provide 30-minute, 1-to-1 lessons with students who show early signs of reading difficulties. In each lesson, a child reads both familiar and new texts while a teacher keeps a “running record” of which words the student reads incorrectly, with notes about potential causes or miscues. The lessons also include writing and letter-sound practice.

In 2010, as part of the federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, research program, more than 8,000 of the lowest-performing readers were randomly assigned to participate in Reading Recovery either in the first or second half of their 1st grade year. That study found that after five months, children who participated in the program improved by more than 130 percent of the average reading growth for 1st graders nationwide—an effect considered at the time to be one of the largest seen for reading interventions.

While the initial i3 studies, conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware’s Center for Research in Education and Social Policy, could show causal evidence of the short-term benefits of the program, it did not allow researchers to understand the long-term effects because students in the control group also participated in Reading Recovery by the end of the year.

So, in a separate study, Henry May and his colleagues at the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy also tracked reading progress in 150 to 500 Reading Recovery schools each year from 2011-2015 and again in 2016-17. Each school included at least seven students who initially scored just below the reading cutoff to participate in Reading Recovery, as well as at least three students who performed just above the reading cutoff and could act as a control group.

For these students, the early benefits of Reading Recovery seemed to reverse themselves over time. Students who participated in the program in 1st grade had state reading test scores in 3rd and 4th grade that were roughly half a grade level below the scores of the students who had barely missed participating in Reading Recovery in 1st grade.

“It’s really important to do long-term impact studies because often they differ from short-term effects,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University researcher who is serving on the peer review committee for the Reading Recovery study. “Either the effects of the intervention compound over time with cycles of positive feedback, or they fade out over time with compensatory interventions” for students who were in the control group, he said. “I think the big takeaway here is that the estimated long-term effects [of Reading Recovery] are negative, significant, and meaningfully large,” Reardon added.

What caused the drop?

What’s not clear is why Reading Recovery’s effects changed so dramatically over time. Some critics have argued that Reading Recovery’s focus on individual student errors can leave holes in explicit instruction for foundational skills. May said it’s also possible that the intervention improves early reading skills that don’t translate as well to skills needed for comprehension in later grades.

But he said students may also lose the ground they initially gain either because schools do not continue the same level of literacy supports in higher grades or because schools actively reprioritize literacy supports for students who show improvements because of early interventions.

The study also comes with major research caveats. For example, less than a quarter of the students could be tracked into 3rd grade, and only 15 percent could be tracked into 4th grade.. While the researchers did not find differences between the students who dropped out of the study in the treatment or control groups, the smaller sample could provide less information on the program as a whole.

In a written response to the study, Reading Recovery advocates argued that students who were prioritized for support while they were in Reading Recovery may have been given less support in later years. “Reading Recovery was not designed to be a panacea,” they wrote, arguing, “the intervention is successful with a majority of the lowest 1st grade readers and writers who receive a full series of lessons. These students are able to continue to make satisfactory progress with the support of good classroom instruction.”

Similar concerns have been raised in other high-profile longitudinal evaluations, including those of the federal Head Start program, for example, in which early supports were not sustained in later grades and early benefits faded out.

May cautioned that Reading Recovery still has more evidence of benefits in early grades than many other common reading interventions. “I would say it’s still perhaps the most effective intervention if you want to produce benefits in 1st grade,” he said. “But that said, when you look at overall impacts across grades ... I do have concerns” about long-term effects.

However, the results may change the equation for schools considering the program: In a connected cost-benefit analysis of 18 reading interventions, which was also presented at the research meeting, Reading Recovery was among the most expensive, ranging from about $5,400 to more than $10,000 per student, depending on the school.

A version of this article appeared in the May 11, 2022 edition of Education Week as Concerns Raised Over Reading Recovery’s Long-Term Effects

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Center for Research in Education & Social Policy

An efficacy follow-up study of the long-term effects of reading recovery under the i3 scale-up.

The purpose of the Efficacy Follow-up Study of the Long-Term Effects of Reading Recovery is to test the sustained efficacy of Reading Recovery (RR), an intensive one-on-one reading instruction program for the lowest-achieving first grade students, on state test scores in third and fourth grade. Many first grade students struggle with reading and for some of these students, low literacy achievement in first grade can set them up for continued difficulty in literacy throughout elementary school and beyond. The Reading Recovery program is based on the idea that individualized, short-term, and highly-responsive instruction delivered by an expert teacher can disrupt this trajectory and allow the lowest achieving students to catch up to their peers. This study is a follow-up study to an i3-funded scale-up study of the Reading Recovery program.

Intervention:

Reading Recovery is a fully-developed program that uses intensive one-on-one reading instruction for the lowest-achieving first grade students in a school. These students receive 12- to 20-week cycles of daily, 30-minute, one-on-one lessons from specially trained Reading Recovery expert teachers. Lessons target phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Reading Recovery teachers receive specialized training that prepares them to tailor lessons to an individual student’s strengths and needs. Each lesson begins with re-reading familiar books, followed by word and letter work, story composition, assembling a cut-up sentence, and previewing and reading a new book. Reading Recovery also relies on continuous collection of data to gauge student progress.

Study Activities:

In this study, the researchers obtained state test scores for students who participated in the original i3 study as well as students from non-i3 schools to see if the impact of Reading Recovery is sustained through third and fourth grades. In addition to collecting students’ third and fourth grade reading or English language arts state test scores, we also administered an online survey through which RR Teacher Leaders or Teachers documented specific details of the experiences of individual Reading Recovery and comparison group students in terms of continued performance monitoring to detect a recurrence of reading problems and participation in supplemental reading programs and interventions. Data for over 9,000 students in more than 700 schools were collected for this study.

Three working papers (prior to peer-review) are being presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on April 23, 2022. Copies of the presentation slides and working papers are available here .

If you have questions about this study, please send an email to the research team at [email protected]

Publications:

May, H., Sarfo, A., & Englert, A., (in preparation, 2018). Short-Term Impacts of Reading Recovery in First Grade: A Regression Discontinuity Study from the 2011-12 Cohort of Non-i3 Schools.

Gray, Abigail; Goldsworthy, Heather; May, Henry; and Sirinides, Philip. (April, 2017). Evidence for Early Literacy Intervention: The Impacts of Reading Recovery . CPRE Policy Briefs. Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

May, H., Sirinides, P., Gray, A., & Goldsworthy, H. (March, 2016).  Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of the Four-Year i3 Scale-Up .  Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

May, H., Gray, A., Sirinides, P., Goldsworthy, H., Armijo, M., Sam, C., Gillespie, J., & Tognatta, N. (June, 2015). Year One Results from the Multi-Site Randomized Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery .  American Educational Research Journal 52 (3), 547 – 581.

May, H., Goldsworthy, H., Armijo, M., Gray, A., Sirinides, P., Blalock, T., Anderson-Clark, H., Schiera, A., Blackman, H., Gillespie, J., & Sam, C. (December, 2014). Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery: Year Two Report, 2012-13 .  Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

May, H., Gray, A., Gillespie, J., Sirinides, P., Sam, C., Goldsworthy, H., Armijo, M., & Tognatta, N. (August, 2013). Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery: Year One Report, 2011-12 .  Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

Start Date: August 1, 2017

End Date: July 31, 2022

CRESP Lead Researcher: Henry May, Akisha Sarfo

Funder: Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education

Partner Organization(s):The Ohio State University, International Data Evaluation Center

Partner Experts:Steve Amendum (UD), Philip Sirinides (Penn), Abigail Gray (Penn), Sean Reardon (Stanford), Brooks Bowden (NC State)

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Emphasis on Preventing Literacy Failure.

Reading Recovery is about preventing literacy failure and reducing the costs of that failure to schools and systems. Strong evidence indicates that preventing difficulties at the onset of learning is the best course of action to take with struggling readers and writers (Juel, 1988; Morris, 2009; Pianta, 1990). Early intervention reduces academic failures and related social-psychological effects.

The effects of waiting to help students who struggle with literacy learning places a burden on upper-grade classrooms that is detrimental to instructional achievement. And the effect/impact on students is immeasurable.

A Complex Theory of Early Literacy Processing.

Marie Clay’s meticulous observation, documentation, and study of the emerging and changing literacy behaviors of young proficient readers led to her theory of literacy processing — a theory of assembling a complex network of systems for reading and writing continuous text. The theory involves many working systems in the brain which

• search for and pick up information,
• work on that information and make decisions,
• monitor and verify those decisions, and
• produce responses (see Ballantyne, 2014; Clay, 2015b; Pinnell, 2010).

Marie Clay’s theory assumed that young readers had to discover what kinds of information exist in texts and what the reader has to attend to in order to extract that information. The beginning reader has to learn to

• get meaning from texts;
• discover how his/her oral language knowledge relates to text (syntactic awareness);
• learn that existing phonological awareness can be applied;
• find out how visual information facilitates the processing of letters, clusters, words, phrases, and print conventions; and
• discover how many other things about books can help the reader (see Clay, 1991, pp. 67–68).

Marie Clay’s research focused on the formative years of literacy learning. Her theory of early literacy processing has made important contributions to the field for all young children and is guided by the following theoretical principles:

• Reading is a complex problem-solving process.
• Children construct their own understandings.
• Children enter the literacy learning process with varying knowledge.
• Reading and writing are reciprocal processes that can be used to support each other.
• Learning to read and write requires a process of reading and writing continuous text.
• Learning to read is a continuous process of change over time.
• Children take different paths to literacy learning.

See the online document, Changing Futures: The Influence of Reading Recovery in the United States (Schmitt et al., 2005, pp. 43–52) for more information.

These understandings continue to be reviewed and revised as a result of quantitative and qualitative research. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals (Clay, 2016) is the latest example of the continuous attention given to new research for instructional improvement.

Constructive Learners Take Different Paths to Literacy Learning.

Children construct their own understandings. It is the child who must explore and solve problems — the child does the learning. An active, constructive learner becomes independent by taking the initiative to solve problems, making some links to what he already knows, and working at a difficulty when facing challenges in reading and writing (see Clay, 2016, p. 133). The teacher sets conditions in which the child can learn and provides guidance, but it is the child’s understanding that underlies the learning process. In Reading Recovery, the word strategy refers to in-the-head activity initiated by the learner. S trategic activity refers to what goes on when the child’s brain picks up information from a text, works on it, makes a decision, and evaluates the response (see Clay, 2015b, p. 127).

Children take different paths to learning, especially when learning involves complex processes like reading and writing (Clay, 2014). No sequenced course of study will meet every child’s needs. The teacher must tune in to the individual nature of the learning process, especially with children experiencing difficulties. Reading Recovery’s “complex theory of literacy learning supports the view that there are many parts of literacy processing which can be difficult for children. Different children have different strengths and weaknesses, and there may be many causes of difficulty varying from child to child” (Clay, 2015b, pp. 300–301). This complex processing theory is critically important for creating powerful learning opportunities for any child struggling with early literacy learning. It, therefore, allows teachers to work successfully with students of diverse literacy learning challenges.

Reading and Writing as Reciprocal Processes That Support Each Other.

Perhaps more than anyone in the field of early literacy, Marie Clay recognized the value of writing in the process of becoming literate. She included writing in the Reading Recovery lesson because of its close, reciprocal relationship with reading. Reading and writing processes both pull from the same sources of information—knowledge about letters, sounds, words, language, and meaning—and each benefits the other (see Askew & Doyle, 2008, p. 47; Clay, 2016, pp. 22–23).

Reading and Writing of Continuous Text.

Constructive literacy learning needs to occur primarily during the reading and writing of meaningful texts. Daily Reading Recovery lessons involve reading familiar and new books and composing and writing a message. Only by engaging in these tasks can a child become proficient in the complex, integrated tasks of reading and writing. What really matters is how young learners work to engage with continuous texts because they provide interrelated supporting structures such as language, meaning, and phonological information.

Reading Recovery teachers know that “children can learn to monitor their own reading and writing and to flexibly change responses as they search, select, and self-correct — which can only be achieved with massive opportunities to read and write continuous authentic texts” (Askew, 2012, p. 21). Although lessons include attention to letters, words, and sounds, children can learn to problem solve as a reader and writer only by reading and writing connected text.

Measuring Student Progress: A Continuous Process.

Schools often measure students’ literacy progress with tests. In a literacy processing view of progress, however, progress is measured when we study how children work on texts as they read and write. Reading Recovery focuses on each child’s daily changes in literacy behaviors. Teachers’ close observation and records reveal movement toward an effective literacy processing system at any stage of progress, responding to the question “What operations does he carry out and what kinds of operations has he neglected to use?” (Clay, 2015a, p. 313).

With close observational records, teachers can measure each student’s progress daily and across time. Unlike progress measured by test scores, this systematic observation supports teachers’ daily decision making.

THE JOURNAL OF READING RECOVERY

Spring 2024.

Constructing a More Complex Neural Network for Working on Written Language That Learns to Extend Itself by Carol A. Lyons

Reading Recovery IS the Science(s) of Reading and the Art of Teaching by Debra Semm Rich

Predictions of Progress: Charting, Adjusting, and Shaping Individual Lessons by Janice Van Dyke and Melissa Wilde

Teachers Designing for Context: Using Integrity Principles to Design Early Literacy Support in Aotearoa New Zealand by Rebecca Jesson, Judy Aitken, and Yu Liu

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