Improving reading achievements of struggling learners

In The Netherlands, the percentage of struggling readers in the 1st year of formal reading instruction is about 25%. This problem inspired us to develop the Reading Acceleration Programme. To evaluate the effectiveness of this programme, a quasi-experiment is carried out. The teachers in the experimental group have been trained to improve their core instruction, to broaden their instruction for struggling learners, and to implement special measures for pupils who do not respond sufficiently to these interventions. A significant difference was found on the post-tests for measuring reading of single words and reading whole sentences, after correcting for pre-test, age, intelligence, socioeconomic status, and ethnic minority. Furthermore, the programme turned out to reduce the percentage of struggling readers in the experimental group from over 28% to less than 6%. In the follow-up study, the overall effects remained to a moderate degree.