Intervention
Early interventions are designed to help students before they begin to fail. Knowing which students are at risk for reading difficulty and what to do for those students are the first steps in providing effective early intervention. Find out how to use this knowledge to help prevent reading problems for struggling readers.
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The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study: Early Impact and Implementation Findings
While much has been learned about literacy in the elementary grades, less is known about programmatic approaches that help struggling adolescent readers acquire the skills they need to succeed in high school. The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study tests the effectiveness of two supplemental literacy interventions targeted to ninth-grade readers with reading comprehension skills that are two to four years below grade level. The interventions studied are (1) Reading Apprenticeship for Academic Literacy from WestEd and (2) Xtreme Reading from the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning.
What are Key Components of Dropout Prevention Programs?
Dropout prevention research shows that most programs use more than one type of intervention (family outreach, academic tutoring, personalization and vocational training, for example). While there is no one right way to intervene, research has identified several key components to intervention success.
Three Things Research Tells Us about Interventions for Struggling Readers
This article, excerpted from a larger guidance document from the Center on Instruction, looks at what research tells us about helping students who read below grade level, and highlights the following findings: 1) schools must provide varied instructional support, based on the degree and nature of the student's difficulty; 2) it is important for students to learn comprehension strategies, and strategy instruction should be coordinated between literacy specialists and content-area teachers; and 3) more research is needed to prove which instructional improvements are really effective.
Word-level Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers
This article, excerpted from the report Academic Literacy Instruction for Adolescents: A Guidance Document from the Center on Instruction, advocates that teachers spend less time focusing on specific reading fluency and accuracy targets, since those vary significantly depending upon the purpose of the reading, and instead use reading interventions with demonstrated impacts on adolescent fluency and accuracy.
A Theory of Adolescent Reading: A Simple View of a Complex Process
How do adolescents move from reading words to applying knowledge learned from a text? See the adolescent reading model and the Strategic Intervention Model (SIM) clearly illustrated.
Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers
This article presents a round-up of intervention initiatives aimed at struggling adolescent readers. It provides a snapshot of program characteristics and research findings for: Reciprocal Teaching; Apprenticeship in Reading; Read 180; Language!; SRA Corrective Reading; and Strategic Instruction Model (SIM).
Clues to Dyslexia in Young Adults and Adults
Learn about how the specific signs of dyslexia, both weaknesses and strengths, in any one individual will vary according to the age and educational level of that person.
Having Your Child Tested Outside of School
Kids who struggle with reading often need extra help. This help usually comes from the school, but some parents choose to look outside of the school for professionals who can assess, diagnose, tutor, or provide other education services. The following article provides information on how to find the right person for your child.
Re-Conceptualizing Extra Help for High School Students in a High Standards Era
The push to ensure all students engage in challenging classes in high school has created new demands on high schools, including a demand to providing extra help for students who are behind in reading, mathematics, and advanced reasoning skills. This report from the Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS) at Johns Hopkins University looks at the nature of the extra help schools must provide, and argues that the old model of offering only three types of extra help-functional skills for students deemed to have limited futures, remedial instruction in elementary skills; or tutoring for students struggling to pass a course or improve their test scores—must be abandoned and replaced by interventions that support and accelerate the development of intermediate and even more advanced skills.
The Effects of an Intensive Reading Intervention on the Decoding Skills of H.S. Students with Reading Deficits
This article summarizes a study that evaluated the effectiveness of intensive instruction in reading decoding skills with struggling 9th grade readers. Subjects in one school were removed from their English classes for 4 to 8 weeks, during which they received intensive small-group instruction in the Word Identification Strategy, a learning strategy for decoding multi-syllabic words. Students in the comparison school received traditional reading instruction. The experimental students made an average gain of 3.4 grade levels in decoding skills compared with an average gain of 0.2 in the comparison school. Results indicate that intense strategy instruction within a relatively short time period can boost students' decoding skills by several grade levels.
