Reducing Reading Failure for Kindergarten Urban Students: A Study of Early Literacy Instruction, Treatment Quality, and Treatment Duration

Six instructional assistants taught the Early Reading Intervention (ERI) curriculum to 38 at-risk kindergarten students, and 32 nonrisk students served as comparisons. Student risk was determined based on performance on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills subtests of Nonsense Word Fluency, Letter Naming Fluency, and Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF). The Word Attack (WA) and Letter-Word Identification (LWID) subtests of the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achieve-ment were used to confirm risk status and also as pre- and posttest measures. Treatment students received between 6.85 and 13.70 hr of instruction, with varying degrees of treatment quality. Multiple linear regression was used to analyze the amount of variance in gain scores that could be explained by participation in ERI, treatment quality, and treatment duration. Results showed WA and LWID gains with large effect sizes for treatment students. Findings for treatment quality and duration were mixed, without clear indications of their effects on gain scores. Keywords early intervention reading instruction, literacy, prereferral intervention, response to intervention, reading decoding, phonological assessment Underachievement in reading is a well-documented and persistent problem. The National Center for Educational Sta-tistics (NCES, 2007) has reported that during the 2005–2006 school year, 36 % of all fourth grade students scored below the “basic level ” in reading. Students in urban areas fared worse, with 46 % reading below the basic level. This means that nearly half of urban fourth grade students do not have the reading skills necessary to perform grade-level work. Students attending schools in high-poverty urban areas are at the greatest risk (Foorman & Moats, 2004) because this popu-lation may have reading failure rates as high as 70 % (Good