Closing the Reading Gap: First Year Findings from a Randomized Trial of Four Reading Interventions for Striving Readers

This report presents interim findings from the Power4Kids evaluation. Conducted just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, the evaluation is assessing the effectiveness of either substantial parts or all of four widely used programs for elementary school students with reading problems: Corrective Reading, Failure Free Reading, Spell Read P.A.T., and Wilson Reading. The interventions for the evaluation were structured to offer about 100 hours of pull-out instruction in small groups of three students during one school year. The evaluation consists of an impact study, an implementation study, and a functional neuroimaging study. Leading the impact study, Mathematica developed a scientifically rigorous experimental design with random assignment at two levels: (1) 50 schools from 27 school districts were randomly assigned to one of the four interventions; and (2) within each school, struggling readers in grades three and five were randomly assigned to a treatment group or a control group. Nearly 800 children are included in the study. This report describes the implementation of the interventions and presents impacts on reading achievement at the end of the intervention year. The report was recently released by the U.S. Department of Education, 27;28, as the second volume of a congressionally mandated report on the Title I program.