Relative Effectiveness of Reading Intervention Programs for Adults With Low Literacy

Abstract

To compare the efficacy of instructional programs for adult learners with basic reading skills below the 7th-grade level, 300 adults were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 supplementary tutoring programs designed to strengthen decoding and fluency skills, and gains were examined for the 148 adult students who completed the program. The 3 intervention programs were based on or adapted from instructional programs that have been shown to benefit children with reading levels similar to those of the adult sample. Each program varied in its relative emphasis on basic decoding versus reading fluency instruction. A repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance confirmed small to moderate reading gains from pre- to posttesting across a battery of targeted reading measures but no significant relative differences across interventions. An additional 152 participants who failed to complete the intervention differed initially from those who persisted. Implications for future research and adult literacy instruction are discussed.

Keywords:

• Adult literacy
• reading intervention programs
• decoding
• reading fluency
• reading assessments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was funded by a grant (HD 043774) from the National Institute for Literacy, Office of Vocational Education, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We are grateful to the National Center for Educational Statistics and to Kelly Bruce and Jen Lentini for assistance with data collection and management. We also thank Maryanne Wolf, Katherine Donnelly Adams, and Terry Joffe of Tufts University for use and expertise in adapting the RAVE-O program; Timothy Rasinski for expert consultation regarding the Guided Repeated Reading program; and Marcy Stein, University of Washington, for assistance with training and materials for the SRA Corrective Reading Program. Preliminary analyses of data from this project were previously reported in presentations to the American Educational Research Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. Any opinions expressed in the publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of Educational Testing Service.

Notes

Complexities in implementing this design and their implications are discussed in the Procedures and Limitations sections.

Another 28 adults were piloted in a fourth, nonrandomized, intervention trial, which was discontinued in the study. Their data have been excluded in this report. Another 43 adults were also posttested without receiving any intervention. They are included in the subsample of the nonintervention group, but we are not reporting on their posttest scores in this report. Finally, two students were dropped from analyses because of missing pre- or posttest data.

Ten sessions represents 12 to 15 hours of direct instruction using the intervention materials across 3 to 5 weeks (as well as regular classroom instruction); substantial coverage of a sequence of decoding lessons or repeated readings that might result in a gain at posttest. In addition, total number of sessions neither was a significant correlate of gains nor changed the results when entered as a covariate in the MANOVA model.