Reading Recovery Information
What is Reading Recovery?
Reading Recovery® is a proven, short-term early literacy intervention
for first-grade children having extreme difficulty learning to read and
write. For an average of 12 to 20 weeks children receive daily, one-on-one, 30-minute lessons
taught by a specially trained teacher. Most children served by Reading
Recovery make accelerated progress and meet grade level expectations in
reading and writing.
Children served in Reading Recovery develop
effective reading and writing strategies that enable them to continue
learning independently in the classroom. Reading Recovery can also serve
as a pre-referral program for a small number of children who may need
specialized longer-term help.
"The goal of Reading Recovery is to dramatically reduce the number of
learners who have extreme difficulty with literacy learning and the cost
of these learners to education systems." -Marie Clay, founder, Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery Success
The goal of Reading Recovery is to reduce the number of first-graders
struggling to read and write. By doing so, Reading Recovery lowers the
future cost of educating these challenged literacy learners. Reading
Recovery achieves this result by focusing on four key areas:
- Powerful Literacy Intervention for Children
Reading Recovery is both an early intervention program and an early identification program with two positive outcomes.
- Positive outcome #1: After
12 to 20 weeks of daily lessons most children have developed effective
literacy processing systems in reading and writing. They no longer
require extra help and need only a good classroom literacy program to
continue improving.
- Positive outcome #2: A small
number of children receive a recommendation for specialized longer-term
help. In this way, Reading Recovery serves as an early referral
program.
- Training and Professional Development for Educators
Reading Recovery educators improve their skills by participating
in a year-long, graduate-level study followed by extensive professional
development opportunities where they explore proven, research-based
theory and teaching procedures. There are three levels of Reading
Recovery training: teachers, teacher leaders and trainers of teacher
leaders. For details see: Reading Recovery Training.
- Long-Range Plan for School-wide Implementation
Educators in Reading Recovery schools work to ensure that all
children who need the intervention receive it. A school has reached full
coverage when it has enough Reading Recovery teachers to help all
children identified as needing the program. This generally means
approximately 20 percent of the first-grade cohort.
- Empirical Support for Reading Recovery
An independent review of the experimental research on Reading
Recovery by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), a branch of the United
States Department of Education (USDE) Institute of Education Sciences
(IES), established
that Reading Recovery is an effective intervention based on
scientific research. Of the 170 Beginning Reading programs reviewed,
only Reading Recovery was found to have positive effects across all four
of the literacy domains:
alphabetics, fluency, reading comprehension, and general reading
achievement.
For details see:What Works Clearinghouse (.pdf)