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Early Intervention
Early Intervention is a term used by educators to describe teaching techniques and programs that help students who are struggling before they fall too far behind.
Research has shown that remediation is not an effective strategy for helping struggling readers. Current studies show that Early Intervention methods are the most effective way to help struggling readers.
The Early Intervention techniques used in this tutoring program follow the guidelines set by the state of Virginia and endorsed by current research.
Early Identification, Prevention, And Early Intervention For Children At-Risk For Reading Failure
By G. Reid Lyon and Jack M. Fletcher (Source www.cdl.org)
Good readers understand how print represents the sounds of speech, can apply phonemic and phonics skills in a rapid and fluent manner, and possess sufficient vocabularies and other language abilities to actively connect what they are reading to their background knowledge and experiences. Conversely, children who are most likely to have reading difficulties enter kindergarten lacking sufficient phonological processing skills and fail to develop adequate word reading ability. This “bottleneck” in word reading skills limits their ability to ability to learn how to text in a fluent fashion with good comprehension. Their text reading is typically slow and laborious, which impedes their understanding of what is read.
Among these children the effort exerted in reading is frequently not rewarded by enjoyment and learning. Frustration on the part of the child and a decrease in attempts to read are often observed. Limited reading practice and experience result in weak vocabulary development and difficulties in learning other academic subjects. And the cycle goes on (see Fletcher & Lyon, 1998 and Snow, Burns and Griffin, 1998 for a review of these issues).
Unfortunately, most children who have these early difficulties learning to read continue to have them throughout their school careers primarily because they do not receive quality instruction soon enough. Indeed, most children who display the types of reading difficulties described here do not receive “specialized” instruction until the third grade and beyond. This is far too late.
The long term development of reading skills appears difficult to alter the older a child becomes despite attempts to remediate the problem in later elementary school and beyond (Moody, Vaughn, Hughes, & Fisher, 2000). In a recent analysis, Hanushek and his associates (1998) found that placement in special education for reading difficulties was associated with a gain of only 0.04 standard deviations on reading measures. Unfortunately these gains are so small that children are not closing the gap between their academic performance and the demands of what they must learn. Even the most intensive interventions with older readers improve only a subset of critical reading skills (see Torgesen, 1997).
Because most reading remediation efforts have not been effective, a number of recent studies have examined prevention and early intervention approaches that have the potential to reduce the number of children failing to learn to read (see Lyon, Fletcher, et al., 2001 and Torgesen, 2000 for reviews). Torgesen, for example, summarized five prevention and early interventions, all of which resulted in a reduction in reading difficulties among young children. Specifically, in all of the studies, children were identified as at risk for reading failure in kindergarten and first grade based on assessment results that identified the children in the bottom 12-18 percent of the school population in either phonological processing (kindergarten) and word reading skills (first grade). After intervention, the reading performance of the children in the early intervention groups in each of the studies was well within the average range.
The data strongly indicate that if the interventions used in these studies were available to all children at risk for reading failure, less than six percent of the population would be in need of specialized interventions, such as those typically provided through special or compensatory education, for reading difficulties later in school. This is a massive improvement in the development of reading skills among school aged children where currently anywhere from 18 percent to 38 percent of children are not learning to read in our Nation’s classrooms.
In summary, our ability to design and implement effective early identification and intervention programs is undergoing rapid development. Many states, notably Texas and Virginia, have developed assessments for K-2 reading programs that are based upon the scientific evidence on reading development and reading instruction and are teacher administered. Although the purpose of these instruments is to guide instruction, they also do a good job of identifying children at risk for reading difficulties.
The success of these programs in combination with the results derived from high quality early reading intervention studies (see the Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000) tell us clearly that we must expand prevention and early intervention programs. Our children deserve no less.
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