CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

Which is More Effective: Classroom-Based or Pull-Out Reading Interventions?

Erica Breuer
Sonoma State University
EDUC 571
Dr. Paula Lane
May 7, 2015

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

Which is More Effective:

Classroom-Based or Pull-Out Reading Interventions?
Introduction
In a general education classroom, there is always a diverse group of students with varying
abilities and backgrounds. Though not all students enter with the same abilities, they are
expected to meet and exit their school year proficient in many skills, one of them being reading.
In order to meet the needs of these students, schools create interventions that attempt to address
specific skills that they may be lacking in order to help them keep up with their peers. These
interventions may be provided one on one, in a small group outside the classroom, or small
groups within the classroom. The question of which method is most effective has been studied
since the idea of special education began. During those early years, students with special needs
were excluded from general education and solely taught in separate environments. Over time,
including these students into general education classrooms to the fullest extent possible has been
the goal of special education. (Bentum & Aaron, 2003) The degree to which these students are
included, though, is the focal point of many individual education plans. With the growing
popularity of the Response to Intervention (RTI) model at many schools, the decision of which
intervention is most appropriate for a struggling student is always at the forefront of these RTI
meetings. This literature review will look at which interventions, pull-out or classroom based,
are most effective for students struggling to meet grade level standards in reading. In order to
understand this question, one must first look at what struggling readers need in quality
interventions, and then examine the literature on effective methods of intervening in a students
reading progress.
What Struggling Readers Need

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

In order to look at the effectiveness of varying reading interventions, it must be

established what struggling readers need in a quality intervention program. In an article by
Sheila W. Valencia and Marsha Riddle Buly, Behind Test Scores: What Struggling Readers
REALLY Need. (2004), several aspects of quality interventions are brought up. First, they
remind the reader that interventions do not always meet the needs of all struggling readers.
Though students in intervention groups may be in the same grade, they often have very different
skill deficits. In order to identify these, more diagnostic assessments are needed than just end of
year standardized test results. Another aspect that the authors bring up is that multilevel, smallsized groups are the most effective, and that these groups need to be flexible enough to allow
students to enter and leave the groups as necessary. No student should continue to be in the same
group if diagnostic assessments have shown changes or growth in their abilities. The study also
mentioned that students would benefit from teachers and other professionals collaborating
together in order to meet the demands of their educational program. These professionals include
reading specialists, English language specialists, and other paraprofessionals who have insight to
the students progress. Finally, students with English language needs make the most progress
from long-term interventions that cross over into the general education classroom. All of these
characteristics help a student benefit the most from any reading intervention. (Valencia & Buly,
2004)
Another study by Jeanne Wanzek and Sharon Vaughn, Research-Based Implications
from Extensive Early Reading Interventions (2007), further discussed the needs of struggling
readers by examining long-term interventions to see if they were effective in increasing reading
results. In this study, they brought up the fact that intervention is different than reading
instruction because they are meant to meet the needs of an individual, not the large group of

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

students in a general education classroom. They found that one-on-one interventions had the
highest results, and that the three worst results in the study came from the three interventions
with the largest group number. This supported the information in the previous article that
students need small sized of intervention groups. In contrast to the first article, though, this
study did not find that a longer time in interventions created better results. Group size and the
grade in which interventions were started were found to be the most effective. They found that
starting interventions in the first grade had higher results than second or third grade. Overall,
this article supported much of the information mentioned in the previous article, but did not
prove that longer interventions proved more effective. (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007)
In a more recent article by Jeanne Wanzek and Christie Cavanaugh, Characteristics of
General Education Reading Interventions Implemented in Elementary Schools for Students With
Reading Difficulties, (2012) many of these same characteristics were found to be true. In this
study, researchers surveyed a large group of teachers and educators in Florida in order to get a
general sense of what interventions looked like. They found that small groups of between two
and five children were the most common in terms of group size. Those groups met an average of
twenty to forty minutes over three to five weeks. These findings were in alignment with the
conclusions from the last article that reading interventions did not need to last for long periods of
time. The survey also found that by the third grade, most students were receiving their
interventions from a reading specialist, whereas kindergarteners were receiving interventions
from paraprofessionals in and out of the classroom. This was an interesting observation, seeing
as how the last article had mentioned that it was important to start reading interventions as early
as possible. Interestingly, three-fourths of the teachers thought that their students were getting

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

what they needed in terms of reading interventions. Again, this study gave a clear view of what
students needed in terms of interventions. (Wanzek & Cavanaugh, 2012)
Pull-Out Interventions Vs. Classroom Based Interventions
After the general characteristics of an effective reading intervention group are
understood, the question of which intervention model is most effective becomes apparent: pullout or classroom based? In an article by Melissa Woodward and Carolyn Talbert-Johnson,
Reading Intervention Models: Challenges of Classroom Support and Separated Instruction,
(2009) the authors consider this very issue. They first reiterate what the previously discussed
articles mentioned about the need for small sized intervention groups and daily meetings of
approximately thirty minutes. They also add that these interventions need to be fast-paced, give
feedback quickly, and make decisions on interventions based on data from assessments. They
then went on to discuss reasons for and against these two types of interventions. (Woodward &
Talbert-Johnson, 2009)
When discussing separated interventions, or pull-out, the benefits examined by
Woodward and Talbert-Johnson (2009) included being able to give specific attention to reading
groups, quietness, increased confidence in students who may be embarrassed in front of peers,
and that some intervention programs were really only meant to be completed outside the
classroom. The reasons against using this model were the negative reputation that it received in
the 1930s and 1940s when decisions were made based on instruction and not data. They also
mentioned the lack of collaboration and communication between the general education
classroom and other educators involved in reading interventions. When teachers and reading
specialists were surveyed on this issue, they mentioned the same issues that were brought up by
the authors research. They also explained that a teacher could complete more challenging

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

lessons with students in the general education classroom when students are pulled out for
interventions, but that it negatively impacted the social network of the students who left. They
also mentioned that it was hard to catch students up who left the classroom, as well as the
learning time that was lost when students were going between the two classrooms. (Woodward &
Talbert-Johnson, 2009)
In the discussion regarding classroom based interventions, or push-in, Woodward and
Talbert-Johnson (2009) mentioned many aspects to consider. In the authors research, benefits
for this model included increased collaboration and communication between reading specialists
and the classroom teacher. The negative aspects included the fact that educators may have
different teaching styles and philosophies, not enough space in a classroom, larger amount of
distractions for students in the intervention groups, and that the collaboration could be limited
due to time. In the survey results, teachers and reading specialists reiterated these same benefits
and challenges. They also mentioned that the students were able to be more aligned with the rest
of the classroom, there was less time spent going between classrooms, and that they were able to
mix the groups better with high and low students. The negative impacts of classroom-based
interventions reported by this group included a lack of materials, less small group time, and that
it was hard to schedule the same groups every day when two teachers were involved.
(Woodward & Talbert-Johnson, 2009)
The benefits and challenges of these two methods have also been studied in other
research articles. Pull-out instruction was the focus of an article by Howard Wills, Mary Abbott,
Harriett Bannister, and Jorun Kaufman called Classroom Observations and the Effects of
Reading Interventions for Students at Risk for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. (2010) In
this study, researchers looked at schools using the RTI model in order to tier interventions for

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

struggling readers. The tier one reading instruction for all students in these schools were either
Open Court, guided reading, or Reading Mastery. As for the tier two interventions, the schools
used Early Interventions in Reading, Reading Mastery, or programmed reading. All of the
programs that were used were research based and had records of being effective in teaching
reading, according to this article. The observations of these students showed that they were no
less distracting in the small group interventions compared to when they were in their general
education classroom. Even though this was true, the students still participated more often, and
were on task approximately 80% of the time. As the article stated, students in the experimental
group spent more time in small groups, spent more time reading aloud, and had double the
response rates of the comparison group overall and in the small groups. (Wills et al., pg. 115)
This translated into an increase of nonsense word and oral reading fluency. In general, this study
showed that pull-out intervention was successful for students with behavioral and emotional risk.
(Wills et al., 2010)
In contrast, another article found that separated interventions did not enhance the reading
skills of students and in fact lowered their IQ. In the article Does Reading Instruction in
Learning Disability Resource Rooms Really Work? by Kwezi Bentum and P.G. Aaron (2003),
the authors studied the resource room model for providing interventions. The origin of this
model of separated intervention comes from the idea that students with learning disabilities need
different forms instruction, and those forms of instruction are not needed by students without a
disability. They researched two different groups of students who had been in separated
instruction for three to fifteen hours a week over three years, and the other for six years. The
results of this study showed that in both groups, the students IQ and test scores actually
decreased. Merely 1% of these students made any significant increases in their reading skills,

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

and only 4-6% made enough progress to be moved out of the resource room program. Students
also showed a high level of embarrassment in going to the room, although it was reported that
they eventually grew comfortable there. The authors attributed these findings due to crowded
classrooms and poor teacher training that did not align well with the regular classroom. This was
the clearest indication that the pull-out intervention model was actually ineffective in helping
students make gains in reading. (Bentum & Aaron, 2003)
As another option, classroom based interventions could prove to be more effective if
researched properly. Mary Louise Hemmeter wrote about this topic in an article called
Classroom-Based Interventions: Evaluating the Past and Looking Toward the Future. (2000)
In this article, Hemmeter discusses the fact that inclusion is not just about assigning students to
an inclusive school placement, but it also means that students with special needs participate in as
many classroom lessons and activities as possible. Though inclusion has become the established
practice in special education, many schools do not have the training or resources to fully include
students. Schools continue to utilize pull out interventions, or risk not providing the instruction
that they need. She also mentions that one of the most challenging aspects of classroom-based
interventions is the fact that they need to happen continually throughout the school day, and in
many different situations and activities. Though she discussed the ways in which inclusion could
be done in terms of reading interventions, there was a lack of discussion on the effectiveness of
this method. According to Hemmeter, there is clearly a need for further research in this area in
order to compare it to the other forms of intervention and its effectiveness. (Hemmeter, 2000)
In his article, Effective Early Reading Instruction and Inclusion: Some Reflections on
Mutual Dependence, (2006) Robert Savage also brought up the fact that the research on
classroom-based interventions is not clear. Though this may be the case, he does bring up some

CLASSROOM-BASED OR PULL-OUT READING INTERVENTIONS?

negative effects of pull-out interventions. He discussed the fact that the students who are most
likely to be low performing in reading tend to be boys, have low socio-economic status, and have
disadvantaged backgrounds. These are also the students most likely to be excluded from general
education classrooms, and even sent to private schools. He also mentioned how the resource
room model perpetuates this exclusion by reinforcing the idea that these students need extended
interventions, which in turn creates a physical segregation between students who are low
performing and their peers. In terms of inclusion, Savage mentions that one on one intervention
have proven highly effective, but are not cost effective. Small groups were also mentioned as
effective, especially when using a highly structured and over-learned method that is not
differentiated or segregated from the regular classroom activities. When using this approach in a
kindergarten classroom for reading interventions, the students in the article did not need separate
reading interventions. This was compared to a similar classroom where the teacher used a mixed
phonics and target-based method for the whole class. (Savage, 2000)
In another article by Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Kirsten Kaines, Steve Amendum, Marnie
Ginsburg, Tim Wood, and Amanda Bock called Targeted Reading Interventions: A Coaching
Model to Help Classroom Teachers with Struggling Readers (2012), the authors discuss the
success of a classroom-based reading intervention that proved to be successful compared to other
models. In this study, they again reiterated that effective interventions need to be in small groups
or one on one, provided early in a childs education, and also mentioned that explicit word
identification should be a key component in the goals of the interventions. In this method called
Targeted Reading Instruction, the classroom teacher provided 15-minute one-on-one
interventions to students in a classroom by collaborating with a reading specialist twice a week.
This was to be used as a tier II intervention in the RTI model of providing educational support to

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students. Though time consuming for the teacher, it was proven to significantly increase the
phonemic awareness and word attack skills in the groups that they provided the intervention
groups to. In addition to this, it was also shown to have highly effective results with boys and
minority groups who historically do not respond well to reading interventions. It did not show
great results for students from low income backgrounds in the area of phonological awareness,
though, and they mentioned that further research should be done to see if increased time in the
intervention could improve these scores. According to the authors, this intervention provided
results that were as effective as one-on-one tutoring models outside the classroom, which they
say had not been demonstrated in previous research. (Vernon-Feagans, 2012)
In a final article regarding the effectiveness of classroom-based or pull out interventions
called Classroom-Based Interventions May Be More Effective than Pull-Out Programs for
Speech-Language Pathology Interventions for Young Children with Specific Language
Impairment, (2008) Jennifer Stephenson discusses the application of these models in the field of
speech and language pathology. This article reported that in two out of three studies reviewed in
this article, more success was found with classroom-based interventions. The third study found
no real difference in overall effectiveness, but did find that the classroom-based interventions
created better productive language results and pull-out programs produced receptive language
results. The results of the study were not completely conclusive, and again a call for more
research was mentioned. Although this was not specifically regarding reading, language
impairments can impede reading development in many children. The results of this article
showed that classroom-based interventions may not need to be limited to reading only, but could
also be used to provide cross-curricular support for students with special needs. (Stephenson,
2008)

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Technology Use In Classroom-Based Reading Interventions

After looking into the effectiveness of classroom-based interventions, the use of
technology became a common theme in the research available. Dave Edyburn wrote about this
topic in his article Research and Practice. (2004) In this article, he begins by discussing how
students must be successful readers by grade three, because by grade four all problems will be
exaggerated due to the fact that explicit reading instruction has been phased out by this point. He
points out that 15% of children will need remedial, clinical, or learning disability support in
reading at some point, and 3% will have a severe problem that will impede their progress. He
then brings up that educators have not focused much on decision-making in regards to the use of
assistive technology for these students who need intervention. Some tools that he brings up as
useful are Inspiration, Bable, Read 180, hypermedia based tools, and text-to-speech technology.
All of these could provide meaningful opportunities for intervention services and differentiation
for struggling readers in the classroom. He also brings up the fact that though research has
shown some success, it is inconclusive in determining effectiveness. Like others, he points out
the need for more research in determining the effectiveness of reading interventions. (Edyburn,
2004)
Another approach to using technology as a classroom-based intervention was analyzed in
an article called Technology Infusion in Success for All: Reading Outcomes for 1st Graders
(Chambers et al., 2008). This study looked at how videos can be embedded into instruction to
help increase effectiveness of reading interventions. This method, called embedded multimedia,
has been shown to be effective in increasing student learning by reaching students on different
channels of memory. In this study, researchers looked at how an on-line program called Alphies
Alley could supplement the reading program, Success for All. This program is a computer based

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reading intervention program that was used to support the curriculum in the classroom. It used
videos of reading strategies along with targeted practice in order to meet students individual
needs. Students who used this program in conjunction with the regular classroom instruction
were able to catch up quicker and exit the program at a higher rate than students who did not use
the program. Though this is a study of only one specific program, it demonstrates the
possibilities of using similar programs as a method of intervention within the classroom.
(Chambers et al., 2008)
Interestingly enough, an article called Effectiveness of A Technologically Facilitated
Classroom-Based Early Reading Intervention (Amendum, Vernon-Feagan, & Ginsburg, 2011)
used a technology-based approach to a previously researched method. They used the Targeted
Reading Instruction method discussed in the article by Vernon-Feagan et al. (2012), but utilized
technology to address the time challenges that arise when completing one-on-one interventions.
In this study, students continued to receive individualized instruction for 15 minutes at a time
with a reading coach. The difference between this version and the previous method is that the
reading coach was available on a webcam to work with struggling readers, leaving the general
education teacher free to work with the rest of the class. The coach was also available to give
professional support the classroom teacher through the webcam as well. By using this method,
scores in word attack, letter-word identification, passage comprehension, and the spelling of
sounds increased in students participating. This is one of the few studies whose results showed
that classroom teachers could be effective in providing reading interventions with their lowest
students within the general education classroom. Their research also aligned with many other
articles in mentioning the effectiveness of one-on-one interventions outside of the classroom, but

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that these interventions do not often align with classroom learning. (Amendum, Vernon-Feagan,
& Ginsburg, 2011)
In another article looking at struggling readers and the use of technology, the authors of
Technology and At-Risk Young Readers and their Classrooms (Blachowicz et al., 2009)
studied another method by which classroom-based interventions were integrated with
technology. In this study, classrooms used a program called Innovations for Learning (IFL) as a
center for first graders. This program is enriched with sorting and dictation spelling
activities to help students develop the skills needed to decode and spell new words.
(Blachowicz et al., 2009, p.393) After using this program, teachers reported that students made
connections between the content learned on this program and whole class instruction. It also
showed that it was especially effective for English language learners. The individualized
attention and quick feedback was a factor in the effectiveness of the reading intervention as well
as the increase in differentiation. On end of year tests such as nonsense word identification, the
students who used IFL performed significantly better than those who had not. Finally,
independent work habits were shown to increase in the students who participated in this
intervention. Again, the potential for using technology for the purposes of reading interventions
within the classroom was proven effective through this study. (Blachowicz et al., 2009)
Finally, another innovative way to use technology as a classroom-based intervention was
examined in the article Designing Online Learning Opportunities for Students with
Disabilities. (Smith & Basham, 2014). In this article, the idea of blended and online learning is
brought up as a method for meeting the needs for struggling readers. According to the article,
blended learning is an instructional method in which part of the classroom learning is completed
online in addition to the traditional learning methods. On the other hand, online learning is

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completed independently of the traditional classroom. Though there was no discussion of the
effectiveness, they suggest several commonly used programs to use for online and blended
learning. Due to the fact that online and blended programs can be tailored to the specific needs
of a learner, they align well with individual educational plans (IEP) for students in special
education. These methods also support the universal design for learning which will help to meet
the needs of all students, both in and out of special education. Again, technology can help
increase the effectiveness of classroom-based reading interventions by differentiating instruction
for each student. (Smith & Basham, 2014)
Conclusion
After reviewing the literature on the effectiveness of pull-out interventions compared to
classroom-based interventions, several trends became clear. The first and most obvious trend
was the fact that there has just not been enough research done on this specific topic. As Savage
wrote in his article
a search of the ERIC database shows that for the search term reading interventions,
an enormous and thus unreadable figure of 21 111 entries exist. Equally for the generic
search term inclusive schools, a vast 3311 entries now exist, attesting to the importance
attached to these topics. Somewhat surprisingly, a conjunction of these terms (and several
permutations of these terms) reveals only a single unpublished study (Savage, 2006,
p.347)
In the research done for this literature review, only one article was entirely about this topic. This
problem was discussed numerous times throughout the articles studied, and many authors called
for an increase in research. In response to the effectiveness of reading interventions, though not
specifically classroom-based or pull-out, another trend found throughout the research was the

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fact that reading interventions needed to be in the smallest groups possible. Most articles found
that the smaller the number of students in an intervention, the higher the results became. Finally,
in regards to the original question asked, there was no answer that was clearly apparent. None of
the articles were able to definitively prove that one type of reading intervention was superior to
the other. Classroom-based interventions seemed to have a potential for higher effectiveness
with the use of technology, but again conclusive research has not yet been done. The fact that
there are multiple ways to provide reading interventions to students who are struggling was clear,
and educators should consider all methods when designing instruction for those individuals.
Reading intervention models are likely to continue being researched and developed as high
stakes testing becomes increasingly more important. Hopefully further research in the areas of
classroom-based and pull-out interventions will help educators understand the benefits and
drawbacks of each, which in turn will help increase reading achievement in struggling readers.

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