Reading Recovery: Research and evaluation
Research by University College London Institute of Education, in association with Reading Recovery Europe
This section of the University College London Institute of Education (UCL IoE) website explains the Reading Recovery programmes offered by UCL IoE (including teacher professional development and initial teacher education interventions), and an extensive set of resources and signposts on the theory, practice, and outcomes of Reading Recovery.
What is Reading Recovery?
Reading Recovery is a short-term intervention for children who have the lowest achievement in literacy learning in their first school years. It is designed to support those children to reach age-expected levels within 12 to 20 weeks.
Reading Recovery is a short series of daily 30-minute one-to-one lessons with a specially trained teacher. Reading Recovery is different for every child: a cycle of building from what the child knows and establishing what they need to learn next.
What are the benefits?
- Identifies children with literacy difficulties early and offers a means of resolving those difficulties
- Boosts the progress in literacy of the lowest attaining children
- Closes the attainment gap for disadvantaged children
- Improves opportunities for all pupils
- Establishes a Reading Recovery teacher who becomes a highly skilled literacy expert who can share knowledge across the whole school
- Deploys a detailed diagnostic assessment that determines the learning needs of the few children who need longer term literacy support
- Reduces the demand for special educational needs provision.
Research shows that Reading Recovery achieves good results that are swift and long lasting, and is recognised as an example of good practice in literacy education by the European Literacy Policy Network, the Institute for Effective Education, and What Works Clearinghouse.
Why does it work?
Reading Recovery is designed as an early intervention because evidence shows that proficient readers and writers develop early.
Once children begin to fail, opportunities for them to establish normal progress among their peers becomes more difficult, resource-intensive, and costlier to achieve. There is strong evidence that poor literacy outcomes lead to a lack of self-esteem, diminished confidence, school dropout, and other negative outcomes, creating an educational, financial and moral imperative to direct resources to the prevention of reading failure.
Substantial research evidence confirms that Reading Recovery is an effective means of overcoming literacy difficulties for children.
This is especially true for those most at risk of failure, such as children living in disadvantaged households, with limited English language and who have made the least progress in language and literacy during their pre-school and early school experience (D'Agostino and Harmey, 2016).
The key to the successes of Reading Recovery is the model of training, which provides:
- A stable and transparent training structure for teachers and schools
- Support for teachers to become sensitive observers of children's reading and writing behaviours and gain expertise in making moment-by-moment teaching decisions based on a deep understanding of how children think and learn about reading and writing
- Tested methods and interventions to overcome the barriers to learning
- A whole-school approach to increasing the efficacy of interventions.
Since Reading Recovery was introduced in the UK and Europe in 1990, data has been collected and analysed for 200,887 children. This analysis and evaluation concludes that eight out of 10 children who complete Reading Recovery catch up with their classmates (ICL, 2016)
Implications for practice
- All children and young people will benefit from focused interventions to develop their literacy skills and capacities.
- However, interventions must be focused, time-limited, and based on evidence.
- Specific professional development for teachers increases the efficacy of responses to the needs of individual children, and also increases the effectiveness and embedding of whole-school practice.
- Professional development for effective interventions is maximised by reflective and close reading of new research and developments in theory.
- Schools may find it useful to consider how hypothecated funding (such as pupil premium) could be deployed to effectively drive improvements in fundamental attainment in literacy.
FURTHER READING
Reading Recovery Annual Report for UCL Institute of Education: 2015-16, International Literacy Centre, 2016
Ideology and Early Literacy Evidence: A Response to Chapman & Tunmer, R Schwartz, Oakland University, 2015
Overcoming Illiteracy With Reading Recovery, International Literacy Centre, 2014
Early Intervention: The Next Steps, G Allen, 2011
