A principal\u27s perspective of the implementation of Reading Recovery in six metropolitan Nashville elementary schools

The purpose of this study was to provide a principal\u27s perspective of the implementation of Reading Recovery and its impact on the overall academic achievement of at-risk first grade readers in the six pilot schools. It sought to compare two early intervention programs, Reading Recovery and Success For All, that were utilized in selected Metropolitan Nashville schools during the 1995-1996 school year. The subjects of this study were 107 first grade students enrolled in the six pilot Reading Recovery schools who were initially selected for the Reading Recovery one-on-one tutoring lessons. Also included were 107 comparable Success. For All students who were matched with Reading Recovery students on the basis of gender, age, ethnic, and economic status as a means of assessing the achievement results of comparable students in both early intervention programs. The six hypotheses were tested statistically using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). For hypothesis 1, a frequency analysis was run to determine the means and standard deviations on the reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, and total reading sections of TCAP for the total population of the study. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth hypotheses. The independent variable was treatment, Reading Recovery vs Success For All. The dependent variable was the norm-referenced portion of TCAP (reading vocabulary, reading comprehension and total reading). The findings indicated that although Reading Recovery improved the reading performance of the individual students who successfully discontinued from the program, this success did not necessarily translate into major gains on TCAP. Results showed that for the total population, Success For All students, considerably outperformed those in Reading Recovery. Therefore, in answer to the question, Is Reading Recovery the best intervention for schools with a majority at-risk population, where so few are served, but the needs are so great?, the results of this study cast a reasonable doubt