Running Head: EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

Evaluation of Literacy Intervention Expectations

Daniel Coffin
Concordia University, Nebraska

Submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for EDUC 630
July 16th, 2016

Evaluation of Literacy Intervention Expectations

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

I began working at my current school in 2013, with only two years of middle school
Language Arts teaching experience and a Bachelors degree under my belt. What I didnt know
about literacy education could have filled several books. It was likely because of this relative
inexperience and ignorance that, when I accepted the position of 6th grade reading teacher, it
didnt necessarily strike me as odd that our school didnt seem to have a coherent protocol in
place for helping students who couldnt read well on their own. More often than not, if the
serious objections about a students ability to perform well in my class that I raised were heard
by administration, the student was removed from my class and moved into either the basic
skills class or the self-contained classroom for students who received an IEP over the course of
the schoolyear. What interventions students received in these other classrooms, I couldnt say, as
the students were removed from my charge, and I was subtly encouraged to essentially mind my
own business.
Interventions for struggling students were informal, improvised, and generally shared
from peer-to-peer during lunch or after-hours text messages. We did not have the wherewithal to
categorize and analyze the potential import of the types of reading errors we were seeing from
our students, and so our options for targeted intervention were limited (Caldwell & Leslie, 2013,
p. 22-25). Our problems were compounded by the fact that we had all been trained as secondarylevel content-matter specialists and not one of us had any real training as a teacher of literacy. All
our teacher preparation training had led us to assume that students would be able to read by the
time they got to our classrooms; we were not prepared to deal with students who could not
decode text or who had a crippling paucity of vocabulary.
By the time my second year at this school was drawing to a close, I was already thinking
about some of the commonalities I had seen about my most challenged students. They were

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

reluctant to read, they read slowly and awkwardly, they had poor vocabularies, they seemed to
struggle even with short and simple words, they did not seem to pause or recognize punctuation
when they read aloud, and they read without affect. In short, they were disfluent and this
disfluency was likely the root cause of the reading difficulty they were experiencing (Beers,
2003, p. 205).
Armed with this information, I made a presentation at our Language Arts department
meeting and outlined some sample strategies for fluency development intervention I had gleaned
from some professional development reading I had been doing in my spare time. My colleagues
listened politely but didnt seem interested. Thankfully, my principal took my recommendations
under consideration. When the next school year started, it was announced at our professional
development session prior to the start of the school year that our school would be adopting the
Corrective Reading program for students who exhibited difficulty in reading. The Corrective
Reading program is a sequence of direct instruction comprised of two strands: one to help
student develop decoding ability, and another to help students strengthen reading comprehension
skills (McGraw-Hill Education, 2016). Students could potentially complete either one or both
together, as needed. The determination was made that all students who scored a year and a half
or more behind grade-level norms for Reading or Language Usage as measured by the MAP test
would be automatically enrolled in the Corrective Reading program three days a week (two days
for the decoding instruction and one day for comprehension instruction), and students could be
referred for admission testing throughout the year by classroom teachers.
I was not familiar with Corrective Reading when I first began teaching it, and the
information I could find about the program and its efficacy with some online research wasnt
especially promising. A literature review sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

determined that there was no research support for claims that Corrective Reading positively
influenced reading comprehension and very poor support for a positive effect on fluency and
alphabetics (Institute of Education Sciences, 2007, p. 3-4). The purchasing decision having been
made, however, without my input, I resolved to make the best of the situation. Surely, I reasoned,
it couldnt do any more harm than doing nothing.
The initial diagnostic assessment measures student errors in timed oral reading. This
initial figure determines the students instructional placement (in tiers A, B1, B2, or C) and
serves as the baseline for his or her curriculum-based measurement. Decoding instruction
consists of word-attack drills, study of spelling and pronunciation of various letter combinations,
and popcorn reading interspersed with comprehension questions. Comprehension instruction
consisted of study of word families (e.g., the verb conclude, the noun conclusion, and the
adjective conclusive), following oral directions, inferencing, and formal reasoning. Students are
tested on words correct per minute and total errors every day; every few weeks, students are
tested on their ability to spell and pronounce key words from that units classroom reading.
These results of these assessments are recorded in the students consumable workbooks. Students
generally perceived the Corrective Reading program to be drudgery but could occasionally be
enticed to want to participate through appeals to their sense of competition as well as by offering
incentives for progress toward weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
Looking back on the program at the end of the year, I could see by looking over my
students completed workbooks that by the standards that the program measures itself, it was an
effective intervention. In timed oral reading, students words correct per minute (WCPM) had
increased across the board, and every student had passed the word identification test for the last
two quarters of the year. Students were, in general, reading faster and reading more accurately,

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

which should indicate that they had made serious strides toward reading with fluency. This data
impressed upon me strongly that the Corrective Reading program was an effective intervention
for developing decoding skills.
That having been said, decoding with accuracy and automaticity does not by itself a
fluent reader make. Prosody, or the ability to convey meaning through the use of pauses and
variations in tone and pitch, is an equally important aspect of reading wherein fluency and
comprehension inform each other (Rasinski, 2010). My students could read faster and they could
read more accurately, but they still read robotically, or rushed through punctuation without
pausing, or paused where they shouldnt have just because they ran out of breath. I presumed that
this indicated not only the lack of a prosody development aspect of Corrective Reading, but
perhaps also a deficiency in the comprehension strand of instruction. Unfortunately, there was no
measurement component tied to the comprehension instruction and so there was no way for me
to determine objectively how students comprehension skills had developed over the course of
the program.
Having seen the program at work for a year, I would make the following
recommendations for the next year: first, the decoding strand does what it is advertised to do. It
should continue to be implemented in our school. That having been said, while the decoding
strand is effective, it is not comprehensive. It should be supplemented by other instructional
practices which build upon decoding practice to include prosody development, such as audioassisted reading, paired reading, poetry recitation, and readers theater (Rasinski, 2010). Time
could be freed for these activities by eliminating the comprehension strand for which we have no
data regarding efficacy (either gathered anecdotally or demonstrated through research) and which
is presumably already covered by the regular language arts instruction. There might be some

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

value to adopting the Corrective Reading model of word study in word families comprised of
two different parts of speech related to a core verb; an enterprising teacher might wish to conduct
some action research to see if this model is more effective than our current practice of organizing
word study by root words or affixes. In short, the Corrective Reading program is a step in the
right direction, but it is only a single step, and there are many more we much take as an
organization in order to reach our goal of having every student able to read independently.

References
Beers, K. (2003). When kids cant read: What teachers can do. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

EVALUATION OF LITERACY INTERVENTION EXPECTATIONS

Caldwell, J.S., & Leslie, L. (2013). Intervention strategies to follow informal reading inventory
assessment: So what do I do now? [3rd Ed.]. Boston: Pearson.
Institute of Education Sciences. (2007). What works clearinghouse intervention report:
Corrective reading. Retrieved from:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/intervention_reports/WWC_Corrective_Reading_070207.pdf
McGraw-Hill Education. (2016). Corrective reading. Retrieved from:
https://www.mheonline.com/directinstruction/corrective-reading/
Rasinski, T.V. (2010). The fluent reader: oral & silent reading strategies for building fluency,
word recognition & comprehension [2nd Ed.]. New York: Scholastic Teaching Resources.