Effectiveness of Selected Supplemental Reading Comprehension Interventions: Findings From Two Student Cohorts

Improving the ability of disadvantaged students to read and comprehend text is an important element in federal education policy aimed at closing the achievement gap. Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) calls on educators to close the gap between low- and high-achieving students using approaches that scientifically based research has shown to be effective. Such rigorous research is relatively scarce, however, so it is difficult for educators to determine how best to use Title I funds to improve student outcomes. Identifying interventions that improve reading comprehension is part of this challenge.
There are increasing cognitive demands on student knowledge in middle elementary grades where students become primarily engaged in reading to learn, rather than learning to read (Chall 1983). Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack general vocabulary, as well as vocabulary related to academic concepts that enable them to comprehend what they are reading and acquire content knowledge (Hart and Risley 1995). They also often do not know how to use strategies to organize and acquire knowledge from informational text in content areas such as science and social studies (Snow and Biancarosa 2003). Instructional approaches for improving comprehension are not as well developed as those for decoding and fluency (Snow 2002). Although multiple techniques for direct instruction of comprehension in narrative text have been well demonstrated in small studies, there is not as much evidence on the effectiveness of teaching reading comprehension within content areas (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 2000).
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has undertaken a rigorous evaluation of curricula designed to improve reading comprehension as one step toward meeting that research gap. In 2004, ED contracted with Mathematica Policy Research and its subcontractors to conduct the study.1 The study team worked with ED to refine the study design and select the curricula to be tested, and then recruited districts and schools, collected data on implementation and outcomes in two consecutive school years, and analyzed the data. The study was conducted based on a rigorous experimental design for assessing the effects of four reading comprehension curricula on reading comprehension in selected districts across the country, where schools were randomly assigned to use one of the four treatment curricula in their fifth-grade classrooms or to a control group. The four curricula included in the study are: (1) Project CRISS, developed by CRISS (Santa et al. 2004), (2) ReadAbout, developed by Scholastic (Scholastic 2005), (3) Read for Real, developed by Chapman University and Zaner-Bloser (Crawford et al. 2005), and (4) Reading for Knowledge, developed by the Success for All Foundation (Madden and Crenson 2006).