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Closing the Reading Gap: An Evaluation of Power4Kids

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 36 percent of fourth graders read below the basic level. To help these struggling readers improve their skills, the nation’s 16,000 school districts are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on educational products and services developed by textbook publishers, commercial providers, and nonprofit organizations. Yet we know little about the effectiveness of these interventions. Which ones work best, and for whom? Do they have the potential to close the reading gap between struggling and average readers?

To provide the nation’s policymakers and educators with credible answers to these questions, Mathematica collaborated with the Florida Center for Reading Research, the American Institutes for Research, the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, and the Haan Foundation for Children to carry out the Power4Kids evaluation. Conducted just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, the evaluation assessed the effectiveness of either 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. For this evaluation, the interventions provided, on average, about 90 hours of pull-out instruction in small groups of three students meeting every day for one school year.

The evaluation consisted of two main components: an impact study and an implementation 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 were included in the study. We administered multiple rounds of reading achievement tests to these children; conducted surveys of their parents, teachers, and principals; and collected school records data, including reading and mathematics test scores from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment.

The first report from the evaluation presented impacts on reading test scores at the end of the intervention year, when the students in the evaluation were third and fifth graders. The second (and last) report presented impacts on scores from the same tests as of the end of the following year, when most of the students were fourth and sixth graders, and impacts on state test scores from the previous year. Key findings show that the interventions improved some reading skills but did not improve state test scores, younger students benefited more, and the interventions narrowed some reading gaps.

Publications

“National Assessment of Title I Final Report. Volume II, Closing the Reading Gap: Findings from a Randomized Trial of Four Reading Interventions for Striving Readers” (October 2007)
"Closing the Reading Gap: First Year Findings from a Randomized Trial of Four Reading Interventions for Striving Readers" (February 2006). Executive Summary, Full Report (The interim report was also released as the second volume of the National Assessment of Title I: Interim Report to Congress.