November/December 1994

Reading Recovery Students Make Strong Gains in New Study

from New and Noteworthy: Brief Notes on Significant Recent Research in Education

Reading Recovery (RR), a method of one-to-one tutoring for early literacy developed in New Zealand, has been getting a lot of good press. Many educators associate RR with successful intervention for struggling first graders but would like to know more about how the program works. The results of a recent rigorously controlled study by Gay Su Pinnell and colleagues at Ohio State University help to clarify the philosophical underpinnings of RR and its specific instructional techniques.

The researchers compared RR with three other remedial reading programs and a control group. Their results are persuasive. Only the RR students made significant gains in all the areas measured: reading level, comprehension, vocabulary, word attack, and dictation. Perhaps more important, RR students succeeded in sustaining learning into the fall of the following year.

Pinnell and colleagues attribute RR's success to several factors. Most important, they say, is the "teachers' ability [after a year-long, demanding full-time training course] to make spontaneous, effective decisions that provide sustaining feedback and...provide prompts that simplify the demands of the task." Other aspects of RR that account for student success include early intensive intervention, "immersion in authentic and purposeful writing and reading experiences," and a program tailored to suit individual students.

The program, with its teacher training component, is expensive, but its advocates say the cost is justified. "Reading Recovery works for 90 percent of the kids," says Kim Marshall, principal of the Mather Elementary School in Boston. "In the long run, paying for 12 or 16 weeks of special instruction is a lot cheaper than 'lifer' status as a special education or Chapter 1 student."

See: G. Pinnell, C. Lyons, D. DeFord, A. Bryk, and M. Seltzer. "Comparing Instructional Methods for the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders." Reading Research Quarterly 29, no. 1 (January/February/March 1994): 9-38.