Reading Recovery II: Reptiles are Clever Creatures

This is the second and final shipment of information on Reading Recovery. In our first installment
we learned that Reading Recovery is a 12 to 20 week, daily intervention for struggling readers in grade One.  It costs anywhere from $2000 to $8000 per student.  Yet, there is strong reason to question the claims of RR advocates that RR is effective and worth the price.  Basically, there is a lot of good research that says it doesn't work.

Why, then, is it RR popular--often the reading intervention of choice?  Professor Plum will offer some reasons at the conclusion, or end, of the "piece."  So, you'll just have to read it.

Let us now continue with our analysis. [How formal!]

 

Reading Recovery provides struggling readers with too little of the skill they need to become proficient readers.
Reading Recovery rests on the premise that teachers should emphasize context-cue guessing over first teaching children directly, systematically, and comprehensively to read (recognize words and comprehend) by using the code. However, a major reason why children struggle with reading in the first place, and are selected for Reading Recovery and other remedial programs, is that they (1) have not mastered phonemic awareness and sound/symbol relationships, and therefore (2) cannot fluently (accurately and rapidly) read words, and therefore (3) they cannot comprehend (or they quickly lose the sense of) what they are reading (Tunmer et al., 1998). 

In other words, struggling readers use context-cue guessing, and they do this precisely because they are not skilled at the most efficient strategy--namely, sounding out words (Nicholson, 1991; Raynor & Pollatsek, 1989). Indeed, children who use contextual guessing and picture cues are 4.5 times more likely to require Reading Recovery after one year of reading instruction (Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, 2001, p. 146).  Furthermore,

The word recognition skills of these children remain relatively weak because they do not develop as rich a network of sublexical connections between orthographic and phonological representations in lexical memory as normally developing readers (Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, 2001, p. 144).

By teaching struggling readers to use context-cue guessing (which is part of the reason they can't read to begin with!) rather than systematically and comprehensively teaching the code, Reading Recovery appears to decrease these children's later chances of being good readers, because (1) in more advanced text, the most important and informative words are harder to guess from the context; and (2) more advanced texts provide fewer and fewer context cues from which students might try to derive meaning (Schatz & Baldwin, 1986). Therefore, it would be expected that any benefits of Reading Recovery in grade 1 would diminish rapidly as text difficulty increases in higher grades, where context-cue guessing will not work.  This is exactly what does happen, as discussed in the next section.

Moreover, recent research shows that children in Reading Recovery learn to read better when explicit phonics instruction is added to a Reading Recovery program; e.g., "rime analogy training" (Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997), segmenting, blending and riming (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993), and word study to develop phonological awareness and decoding skill (Santa & Hoein, 1999).  In other words, if you simply teach kids properly in the first place, they wouldn't NEED an intervention.  How come you don't hear advocates of RR offering that obvious solution?

Reading Recovery is Less Effective Than It Purports to Be and Does Not Provide Many Struggling Readers with the Skills They Need. 
For example, evaluation research shows that:

1. "…participation  in the RR programme did not eliminate or reduce (the) phonological processing deficits" that in part define children as struggling readers (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999, 2001).

2. The progress of Reading Recovery students remained "persistently well below that of the ND ("Normally Developing") children" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, J.E., 1999).

3. "The RR group obtained significantly lower scores than the ND group on all reading performance measures on each of the three post-RR testing occasions… (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 2001, p. 165).

4. Following Reading Recovery, "…RR children performed relatively poorly in terms of word identification, reading comprehension, classroom book reading level, and reading accuracy" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999, 2001, p. 165).

5. In a large study of Ohio's Reading Recovery, only 53% of the children eligible for Reading Recovery scored at the classroom average on book level measures by the end of grade 1 (Battelle, 1995).

6. "RR failed to significantly improve the literacy development of children considered to have succeeded in the program:  RR children showed no signs of accelerated reading performance, and one year after completion of the programme, they were performing at around one year below age-appropriate levels" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999).

7. Twelve months after they were "discontinued" (i.e., finished with Reading Recovery), about 35% of children continued to benefit, about 35% were no longer "recovered," and "The remaining 30% probably would have improved without such intensive intervention, since a similar percentage of control and comparison students had reached average reading levels by this stage" (Center et al., 1995, p. 241).

8. Children who received Reading Recovery gained 4.6 book levels at time of discontinuation over children who needed remediation but did not receive Reading Recovery.  However, at follow-up, the RR advantage dropped to 2.4 book levels.  For the neediest of struggling readers, the advantage of Reading Recovery was only 1 book level at follow-up (Glynn & Crooks, 1992).

9. "…by third grade, the Reading Recovery instructed groups may not be significantly different from the comparison groups as indicated by measures of text reading" (Shanahan & Barr, 1995).
 
10. Regarding comprehension, former Reading Recovery students perform about the same as comparison groups of struggling readers who did not receive Reading Recovery. Specifically, "proficient oral reading performance at Grade 1 has not resulted in self-extending strategies to other literacy tasks in subsequent grades" (Hiebert, 1994, p. 20).

11. Maintenance of skills taught in Reading Recovery is low. 
For example, even when the primary criterion is a task that is common in RR tutoring—oral reading of text—levels of maintenance at Grade 4 are low.  In Grade 4, approximately 4 students or 5.5% of the cohort will be able to orally read text at the average school level and will score at the average school level on the WRMT-R (Hiebert, 1994, p. 23).

12. For children who completed Reading Recovery, the average score for Oral Accuracy was the only score which "met or exceeded grade-level standards," and "The lowest average score was for Oral Comprehension" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 4).

13. "Literacy Assessment test scores indicate first grade students who successfully completed the English version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower than the control group of non-participating students on all three sub-tests" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 5).

14. "SAT 9 test scores indicate first grade students who successfully completed the English version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower than the control group of non-participating students using the internal studies conducted by the District's RR/DL Program" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 5).

15. "…RR children showed declines in reading self-concept following RR, and they held more negative perceptions of ability in reading and spelling, and in general academic self-concept six and twelve months following RR" (Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (1999).

16. Reading Recovery does not appear to decrease the need for other services, such as special education and Title I (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 987; Pollack, 1994). 

And all this for only 2 to 8 grand per kid!

Reading Recovery Evaluation Appears to be of Questionable Reliability and/or Validity.
The validity of Reading Recovery claims to effectiveness is weak in several ways.

1. The validity of findings and interpretations is threatened by the composition of the treatment group.  In many analyses, only students who are discontinued (i.e., judged successful) are examined. Some students are omitted because of absences and other learning problems.  Other students begin Reading Recovery but are eliminated at the teacher's discretion for low potential (Hiebert, 1994). This makes "the program appear more effective than it really is" (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 991).

2. The major forms of evaluative data are subjective and may be biased.  In Reading Recovery, running records (a major outcome measure) are used to determine where a child places in the 20 levels of book difficulty (Clay, 1993). These records are provided by the Reading Recovery teachers (who have an obvious stake in the outcomes), rather than by impartial evaluators.  Moreover, running records involve qualitative analysis with a high level of inference.  For example, Clay says, "…you need to look at every error the child makes and ask yourself 'Now what led the child to do (or say) that?'" (Clay, 1993, p. 31).

The possibility of unreliability and invalidity are underscored by research showing that, although Reading Recovery teachers rate "discontinued" (i.e., successful) students who can read books at a level of 16., the same children's classroom teachers rate the children's reading book level as only 9 (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999).

3. The design of many Recovery evaluations does not rule out the effects of maturation and other learning experiences (e.g., reading in class and at home) that can account for changes (Shanahan & Barr, 1995).  Again, claims to effectiveness are likely to be inflated.

Reading Recovery Appears to Violate Principles of Equity.
Reading Recovery may violate principles of equity in three ways.

1. A major objective of Reading Recovery is to bring struggling readers to the average level of first grade classroom achievement.  However, this average level differs markedly from school to school and community to community.  The average school performance in low income areas is generally at the 20th percentile, while the average performance in more affluent areas is at the 80th percentile.  Therefore, to bring low-income struggling readers to the 20th percentile sustains their educationally disadvantaged status (Grossen, Coulter, & Ruggles, 1996). 

Moreover, children who read at the 20th percentile level are not likely to be academically successful later.  Such child need school-wide effective beginning reading programs that aim for mastery before the end of grade 1.

2. Reading Recovery is designed to serve the lowest 20 percent of a school population.  This may be equitable in a school with few struggling readers. However, in a school where a majority of children are struggling readers, serving the lowest performing children will leave a large percentage of struggling children untreated.  In other words, Reading Recovery is not designed to solve illiteracy problems in schools with a high proportion of at-risk children.

3. Reading Recovery purports to work with the lowest achieving readers in a school. However, the most needy children may be excluded--sometimes because they are judged too difficult to work with or not likely to benefit.  For example, Glynn & Crooks (1992) report that "Reading Recovery teachers and/or STJCs in three schools said they would not take particular mainstreamed special needs children into Reading Recovery as they were 'too slow to go into Reading Recovery'."

4. In contrast to the explicit objective of Reading First and the No Child Left Behind legislation--which seek to produce high reading achievement in all children--Reading Recovery "never envisioned to recover 50% or more of the children reading below grade level…It was designed to recover 10 to 20% of struggling readers after one year of reading instruction using the New Zealand Balanced Reading Programme" (Reutzle, 1999, p. 323).

Reading Recovery is Very Expensive. 
Several studies report the high costs of Reading Recovery when teacher training, salaries, and materials are considered.
1. Heibert (1994) calculated that the cost per successful student was $8,333. 

2. Shanahan & Barr (1995) calculated that Reading Recovery cost between $4600 and $8333 per successful child. 

3. A longitudinal study (1991-98) by the San Diego Unified School District found that the cost per student ranged from $5,112 to $11,775.

In some districts, a child's one-to-one Reading Recovery (60 lessons) costs more than the entire year's schooling.  Grossen et al., (1996) state that "the data indicate that the cost for Reading Recovery (30 hours of instruction for one child) exceeds the national average per pupil expenditure for one full year of schooling."

Reading Recovery Does Not Appear to Foster Needed School Reform of Reading Curricula.
Reading Recovery is a one-to-one pull-out tutoring program for children in grade 1.  It is designed to serve a small number of individual children.  It is not the proper solution for schools and districts serving disadvantaged children--children who come to school ill-prepared for reading instruction.  These schools cannot wait for children to become struggling readers because of inadequate beginning reading instruction and/or phonological processing weaknesses (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1998).  Rather, these schools must focus upstream--on prevention of reading difficulties--rather than wait for problems to emerge in grade 1.

Such prevention requires school-level or district-level focus on effective reading curricula in pre-k to grade 1 that will teach children essential skills--such as language, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, sound/symbol relationships, decoding strategies, and comprehension strategies (as shown by the preponderance of scientific research)—so that these children by the end of first grade are becoming proficient readers who do not need remedial reading (Chall et al., 1990; Shanahan & Barr, 1995; Torgeson, 1998).  Arguably, only a small percentage of first graders (children with true processing difficulties) would need remediation if they were properly taught the first time.

There Are More Cost-effective Approaches Than Reading Recovery to Beginning and Early Remedial Reading. 
These cost-effective alternatives include the following.

1. In light of research cited above that questions the efficacy of Reading Recovery, it would be wiser for a district to implement school-wide and district-wide beginning reading instruction in kindergarten, and even in pre-k for at-risk children, using field-test curricula that provide direct, systematic, and comprehensive instruction on language, phonemic awareness, sound/symbol relationships, decoding (sounding out) strategies, fluency, and comprehension—-rather than wait for reading problems to emerge and then spend anywhere from $4000 to $11,000 on Reading Recovery per first grade child.

2. Systematic, explicit classroom instruction on phonemic awareness and phonics using decodable text was more effective with Title I children than a Reading Recovery support program.  Indeed, it was found that "It was the classroom curriculum effect, not the tutorial method effect that was significant (Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher, 1997, p.16). 

3. Reading Recovery students read better when explicit phonics instruction is added to a Reading Recovery program; e.g., "rime analogy training" (Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997), segmenting, blending and riming (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993), and word study to develop phonological awareness and decoding skill (Santa & Hoein, 1999). 

4. Fincher (1991) found that "…teacher Assistants with almost no training and minimal teaching materials with which to teach and working in less than desirable conditions, outperformed the Reading Recovery teachers when their students' overall achievement was compared" (Fincher (1991). 

5. For at-risk or struggling children, it is reasonable to use standardized, objective instruments for identifying children's reading difficulties and then providing timely use of explicit, focused instruction (Lovett & Steinbach, 1997; Torgeson et al., 1999).  For example,
a. Lovett et al. (1994) developed a 35 lesson word identification program for dyslexic students for one hour four times per week. This program achieved highly significant results with the "core deficit"; namely, phonological processing and nonword reading skills (p. 818).

b. O'Conner et al., (1995) provided a program for at-risk readers.  The program lasted five hours (15 minutes twice weekly for 10 weeks), and taught letter-sounds, segmenting, and blending.  A second experimental group had a wider range of phonemic awareness activities.  The authors conclude that students in both groups generalized the skills they were taught and used them in the reading process.

c. Hempenstall (2002) developed and evaluated a 50-hour program for early elementary students with many of the same reading difficulties of students selected for Reading Recovery; e.g., below average scores on phonemic awareness, pseudo-word decoding, picture naming, digit span, and spelling--in other words, precisely the children whose core phonological deficits are present in most struggling readers. 

Hempenstall used an inexpensive (about $20) program, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983).  The design features of this program are consistent with the preponderance of empirical research.  In contrast to one-to-one Reading Recovery, students were taught in a more efficient group setting.  Comparing the remedial reading group and the wait-list group, Hempenstall found that the remedial reading group made statistically significant gains in word attack, phonemic awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, phonological recoding in working memory, and spelling. 

In summary, in view of Reading Recovery's high cost, its ability to affect only a small number of children in a school, equivocal evidence of immediate and long-term effectiveness, and generally subjective measures, and in view of readily-available, effective, less costly, and pro-active alternatives, a district would be advised seriously to rethink a plan to use Reading Recovery.

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Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (2001).   Does success in the Reading Recovery Program depend on developing proficiency in phonological-processing skills?  A longitudinal study in a whole language instructional context.  Scientific  Studies of Reading, 5(2), 14-176.

Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (1999).  Success in Reading Recovery depends on the development of phonological processing skill.  Revised Research Report for Phase Three of Contract ER35/199/5.  New Zealand, Ministry of Education.

Clay, M.M. (1979).  Reading:  The patterning of complex behavior.  Aukland, NZ:  Heinemann.

Clay, M.M. (1991).  Becoming literate: The construction of inner control.  Aukland, NZ:  Heinemann.

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Faulkner, H.J., & Levy, B.A. (1999).  Fluent and nonfluent forms of transferring reading:  Words and their message. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6, 111-116.

Fincher, G.E. (1991).  Reading Recovery and Chapter I:  A three-year comparative study.  Canton, OH:  Canton City Schools.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Beeler, T., Winikates, D., & Fletcher, J.M. (1997). Early interventions for children with reading problems: Study designs and preliminary findings. Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8, 63-71.

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Glynn, T., & Crooks, T. (1992).  Reading Recovery in context:  Implementation and Outcomes.  Educational Psychology, 12, 249-.

Greaney, K., Tunmer, W. & Chapman J. (1997).  Effects of rime-based orthographical analogy training on the word recognition skills of children with reading disability.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 645-651.

Grossen, B., Coulter, G., & Ruggles (1996).  Reading Recovery: An evaluation of benefits and costs. Effective School Practices, Summer, 15(3). On-line at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~bgrossen/rr.htm

Hiebert, E.A. (1994).  Reading Recovery in the United States:  What difference does it make to an age cohort?  Educational Researcher, 23(9), 15-25.

Levy, B.A., Nicholls, A., & Kohen, D. (1993).  Repeated readings:  Process benefits for good and poor readers.  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 303-327.

Liberman, I.Y., Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, A.M. (1989).  The alphabetic principle and learning to read.  In Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, I.Y. (Eds.), Phonology and reading disability:  Solving the reading puzzle (pp. 1-33).  Ann Arbor, MI:  U. of Michigan Press.

Lovett, M.W., Border, S.L., DeLuca, T. Lacernza, L., Benson, N.J., & Blackstone, D. (1994).  Treating the core deficit of developmental dyslexia:  Evidence of transfer of learning after phonologically- and strategy-based reading training programs.  Developmental Psychology, 30, 805-822.

Lovett, M., & Steinbach, K. (1997).  The effectiveness of remedial programs for reading disabled children of different ages:  Does the benefit decrease for older children?  Learning Disability Quarterly, 20 189-210.

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Lyon, G.R. (1996).  Learning disabilities.  The Future of Children:  Special Education for Children with Disabilities, 6(1), 54-76.

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O'Connor, R., Jenkins, J., & Slocum, T. (1995).  Transfer among phonological tasks in kindergarten: Essential instructional content.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 202-217.

Pollack, J.S. (1994).  Final evaluation report: Reading Recovery program 1994-94.  Columbus:  OH:  Department of Program Evaluation.

Pressley, M., Johnson, C.J., Symons, S., McGoldrick, J.A., & Kurita, J.A. (1989).  Strategies that improve children's memory and comprehension of text.  Elementary School Journal, 90(1), 3-32.

Pressley, M. (1998).  Reading instruction that works:  The case for balanced reading.  NY:  Guilford Press.

Pressley, M., Almasi, J., Schuler, T., Bergman, J., & Kurita, J.A. (1994).  Transactional instructional of comprehension strategies,: The Montgomery County, Maryland, SAIL, program.  Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 10(1), 5-19.

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San Diego Unified School District.  (1999, October).  Reading Recovery Research Project. San Diego, CA.  On-line at http://www.nrrf.org/sd_rrrp.htm

Santa, C., & Hoein T. (1999).   An assessment of early steps:  A program for early intervention of reading problems.  Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 54-79.

Schatz, E.K., & Baldwin, R.S. (1986). Context cues are unreliable predictors of word meanings.  Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 439-453.

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So, why do so many states, districts, and schools use Reading Recovery?  The words, “stunning stupidity” come to mind, but aren’t nearly insulting enough.  Let’s see.

No one who buys RR knows much about what reading is, how it is best taught, and how it is most-usefully assessed (for purposes of rational decision making). 

Surely, anyone with a bit of commonsense knows that learning to read takes some effort; its skills must be taught by a skilled teacher or by a person using a well-designed and scripted program (just as new surgeons follow a written routine), because even small error patterns can accumulate into big errors (e.g., reading “d” as “duh”); that the obviously best way to read words is to use knowledge of what the letters usually say (phonics) and that guessing using any other cues is NOT reading and only MAKES you dyslexic (“can’t read”).

Most ed schools have been under the sway of whole language and its demented theory of reading--as a psycholinguistic guessing game, in which teaching phonics is not only seen as unnecessary but positively harmful—when in fact NOT teaching phonics makes kids use guessing as a last resort—and guessing is what illiterate people do.  Therefore, most teachers, reading specialists, and administrators who come out of ed schools are not only ignorant but have a head full of nonsense.  They have NO idea how to teach reading properly.  They have NO idea what a sound curriculum looks like.  They have NO idea how to measure progress in all five of the main reading skills in a reliable and valid way. 

BUT THEY ARE CERTIFIED!  In a few years they have tenure.  You think they will be open to criticism?

And, in ed schools they were indoctrinated by their whole language and RR professors.  Approval and grades were contingent upon chanting and writing the mantras of whole language and RR.  I know of final projects that consist of students making a poster of their “Literacy philosophy.”

Debbie and Jenn’s Reading Philosophy

Reading is natural. [wrong]
All children have a right to read.  [Yeah, but you will squash it flat.]
All children should have access to authentic literature.  [Nice, but with you as teacher they won’t have any idea what the books say.]
Students should be life-long learners.  [Whatever that means.  As illiterate adults, they won’t be getting much learning from books.]

[Debbie and Jenn are my advisees.  They began as bright kids.  Now, they are as dumb as a sack of hammers.  So I give them a course in how to teach reading whenever they come for advising.  I won’t let them register until they perform the teaching routines.]

So, these new teachers get jobs in schools where what they have learned is EXACTLY how they are supposed to teach.

The circle is now closed.  Some of these teachers become reading coordinators and supervise other teachers—making sure that they keep teaching kids to guess.  “No, don’t have her sound it out!  Ask her, ‘What word do you THINK goes there?’”

In this way, idiocy breeds idiocy, world without end, Amen.

Worse, access to the way out of this maze of moronitude is blocked in several ways.  If a school realizes that the percentage of kids who can’t read is now so high it is obscene (50%?), then they have to do SOMEthing.  Well, who ya gonna call?  You call your buddies at the local ed school.  And what do they offer?  Reading Recovery. 

The administrators then spend all their Title I funds and spare change on RR and have nothing left to buy good materials, even if they thought (beginner’s luck!) that they ought to. 

If they take no quantitative data on each of the five reading skills, there is no way really to tell why kids can’t read.  So, you simply consider that the KID has a brain problem (“dyslexia”).  This means that you don’t have to critically examine the reading curriculum or how teachers teach, to see if there is any skill they are not teaching.  Therefore, there is no change in curricula or in teacher behavior.

In time, they get used to having a certain percentage of kids, and a certain “kind of kids” not reading.  Illiteracy is now normal. 

Finally, whole language and RR reading coordinators, administrators, and ed perfessers take positions at the state education agencies.  RR is no longer a district choice.  It is mandated!

That’s why you have to demand and support state efforts to make districts and schools accountable. 

Why you have to demand well-designed reading programs and professional development for teachers that is consistent with the preponderance of research. 

Why you have to demand that schools of education teach reading according to the preponderance of research or lose accreditation. 

And why it is wise to support President Bush’s Reading First. 

This alone may not produce needed changes (class action lawsuits would, I bet.) but doing nothing surely won't.

The tragedy here is that the needed change is so small and the benefits are so large. 

Here are all the resources you need to know what works.

Comments

[Steve LaBonne]

"The words, “stunning stupidity” come to mind, but aren’t nearly insulting enough." I've got to get that sentence engraved on a plaque- it's applicable to so many things. Sigh.

[Plum]

Feel free, Steve! Maybe a T shirt from Cafepress.com.