Tiers of intervention in kindergarten through third grade

This study measured the effects of increasing levels of intervention in reading for a cohort of children in Grades K through 3 to deter-mine whether the severity of reading disability (RD) could be significantly reduced in the catchment schools. Tier 1 consisted of profes-sional development for teachers of reading. The focus of this study is on additional instruction that was provided as early as kinder-garten for children whose achievement fell below average. Tier 2 intervention consisted of small-group reading instruction 3 times per week, and Tier 3 of daily instruction delivered individually or in groups of two. A comparison of the reading achievement of third-grade children who were at risk in kindergarten showed moderate to large differences favoring children in the tiered interventions in decod-ing, word identification, fluency, and reading comprehension. By the late 1980s, reading re-searchers were aware of the as-sociations between phoneme awareness (i.e., the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words) and reading ability, whether measured concurrently or used to pre-dict reading achievement one or mor