Does Reading Recovery work?

The success of Reading Recovery as an early intervention program in literacy has been carefully documented since its inception and it has proven to be extraordinarily successful.

Studies in New Zealand, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada demonstrate that Reading Recovery enables most students who are experiencing difficulties in literacy learning to make the accelerated progress necessary to read at the grade level of their peers in an average of 15 weeks.

Studies, completed locally and internationally, present further evidence that most Reading Recovery students continue to read and write at an average or better level after receiving the intervention, thereby reducing the need for long-term remediation.

Students who successfully complete the program are described as “discontinued”.

Accurate monitoring data is kept on the progress of students who have been in the program. Between 1996 and 2004, 52 790 students in NSW public schools, have participated in the program.

Eighty-seven percent of these students have successfully discontinued the program and most of these students continue to thrive within the classroom without requiring additional assistance.

The students who did not successfully discontinue the program still made valuable progress. Participation in the program enabled them to be readily identified as continuing to need intervention.

In Wade's (Wade B., and Moore M., Longitudinal Case Studies of Reading Recovery: NSW and Victoria, Australia 1996) report of NSW and Victorian schools, 56 “discontinued” Reading Recovery students and 56 non-Reading Recovery students with similar educational experiences were tested for sustained reading gains over 6 years.

Research outcomes showed that "discontinued" Reading Recovery students had sustained literacy gains and surpassed the initially more able group.

In his Victorian study, Rowe (Factors Affecting Student’s Progress in Reading: Key Findings from a Longitudinal Study 1995) examined the programs of 147 Reading Recovery students from the end of Year 1 to Year 5.

Rowe found that those initial reading gains were still maintained in Year 5, thus indicating that they had become independent readers.

In contrast, research studies that have followed students who have participated in other remedial programs consistently report that many students' progress was not maintained in the classroom (Wasik and Slavin, Preventing early reading failure with one-to-one tutoring: A review of five programs 1993).

In addition, the many positive comments from students, parents and teachers provide additional evidence of the benefits of Reading Recovery.