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May 13, 2008Reading First Impact Study |
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From MDRC: The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has released the interim report from the Reading First Impact Study, a Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the federal government's $1.0-billion-per-year initiative to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The NRP identified five areas of instructional practice that were found to be essential to teaching children to read: phonemic awareness (manipulation of individual speech sounds), phonics (mappings between sounds and print), fluency (improved speed and accuracy in oral reading), vocabulary, and text comprehension. Reading First is the largest federal funding initiative ever undertaken with the explicit goal of increasing classroom teachers' use of research-based reading instructional practices. Rather than an evaluation of the NRP's conclusions, the Reading First Impact Study is an assessment of the extent to which this federal funding stream increases teachers' use of the essential elements of reading instruction and improves students' reading comprehension skills. Study sites that received their Reading First grants later in the federal funding process experienced positive and statistically significant impacts both on the time teachers spent on the five essential components of reading instruction and on first- and second-grade students' reading comprehension. Districts and schools with the greatest demonstrated need, in terms of student reading proficiency and poverty status, were intended to have the highest funding priority. The impacts of Reading First on teachers' instructional practice and students' reading achievement are consistently positive for late award sites and mixed for early award sites. For grades one and two in sites that received their Reading First grants in 2004, the program produced positive and statistically significant increases in both teachers' instruction in the five dimensions and in students' reading comprehension.
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