Butterfly Phonics Intervention Study

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: Completed

Sex: All

Target Recruitment: 400

Inclusion Criteria

Struggling Year 7 readers in the participant schools conforming to the following eligibility criteria:

1. Key Stage 2 (KS2) test scores in English below National Curriculum level 4
2. Children without KS2 scores but with Yr 7 teacher assessment scores for English which are below a National Curriculum level of 4
3. In the absence of 1 and 2, a reading age on a standardised Yr 7 reading test of at least one year lower than chronological age
4. Pupils must be in Year 7 of a participating school

Randomization protocol will attempt to control for variability in eligibility criteria and schools by treating them as stratification factors in the randomization process such that both the intervention and the control groups have more or less the same number of children recruited using the same eligibility criteria and from the same school. This pragmatic approach for recruiting children implies that the number of children recruited into the trial may differ between schools, but since each school will have equal representation in both
the experimental and control groups, the difference in number of children recruited from the schools should have little or no effect on investigating the impact of the Butterfly phonics programme on struggling Year 7 readers.

Exclusion Criteria

1. Children who do not match the eligibility criteria as detailed above
2. Children who match the eligibility criteria but whose parents do not wish them to take part
3. Children who have additional problems which would mean that they would not benefit from the intervention, needing more specialised assistance than the programme can offer, such as some children with severe learning difficulties.

Study & Design

Study Type: Interventional

Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
The standardised reading score derived from the digital New Group Reading Test, which comprises an initial test of sentence level understanding and a subsequent assessment of comprehension of passages of text. For children who do very poorly on the sentence understanding, they will not receive the text comprehension but go instead to simple phonics questions, such as testing the first sound of a word.<br><br>This is intended to assess their ability to access the sort of reading they will encounter in their secondary school careers, and to see if the intervention has improved their ability to understand passages of writing.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
1. Single Word Reading Test (GL) standardised score of reading aloud a list of words, testing improvement in reading familiar and unfamiliar real words..<br>2. PhAB nonword Reading test standardised score of reading pseudowords, to tap improvements made in relating letters to sounds and in phoneme blending following the intervention