The short -term effects of Reading Recovery on children\u27s reading development: Process and product

The purpose of this study was to analyze the short-term effects of a Reading Recovery Program on young children\u27s reading behavior and test performance during one academic year. The participants were selected from four local public primary schools where there were not enough Reading Recovery teachers to serve all eligible students. Three groups of children were compared: (a) 20 first grade Reading Recovery students from four public Reading Recovery schools, (b) 20 first grade non-Reading Recovery students (who were eligible for Reading Recovery services but did not receive services due to a shortage of Reading Recovery trained teachers), and (c) 20 randomly selected first grade students who did not qualify for Reading Recovery. The short-term effects of Reading Recovery on children\u27s reading were measured by the use of miscue analysis of the students\u27 actual oral reading and the six tasks of Marie Clay\u27s Observation Survey. Data from the reading component of The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) were used to determine the children\u27s relative success as evidenced by their reading scores on a standardized achievement test. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test all 10 hypotheses. The findings indicated that students enrolled in Reading Recovery improved their oral reading levels and use of the semantic and syntactic cueing systems. These students also score about the same as their grade-level peers on the word analysis section of the TCAP test; however, this success did not translate into major gains in reading comprehension