Tackling Two of the Most Important Unresolved Tasks in Reading Intervention

Overview

Poor readers face many risks. Low-literate children are at higher risk of attention difficulties, socio-emotional and mental health issues including low self-esteem, learned helplessness, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, drug abuse and other health risks. Multiple socio-economic risks emerge from low literacy as well. We thus plan to extend programmatic work with a sub-set of the same sample of children we have worked with at Tier 1 (effective whole class) into Tier 2 (supplemental small group) reading intervention and then Tier 3 (further extended supplemental intervention) to examine how to use two promising interventions to solve one of the lingering challenges in reading intervention - improving reading of treatment non-responders in real school contexts run by regular teachers. We plan to take on the second unresolved task in reading intervention (impact at scale) by running this as a scaled up randomised control trial (RCT) in around 100 schools in multiple school boards in Quebec Alberta and Ontario, Canada.

Interventions and intervention responsiveness

The literature on Response-to-Intervention (RtI) documenting effective Tier 1 and Tier 2 early reading interventions studies suggests that an explicit pedagogical focus on both the grapho-phonemic and morphological aspects of the written English facilitate reading attainment. In previous work (Georgiou, 2016-21; Savage, 2012-17), we contributed to this literature by working with a sample of children in Alberta and Quebec (Georgiou, 2022; Georgiou et al., 2021; Savage et al., 2018; 2020). In these projects, we helped over 95% of students to become typical readers. However, 4.5% of children in our sample continued to struggle despite interventions. Such children have been labeled 'treatment resistors' (Blachman, 1994). More work is needed on these promising theory-driven interventions at tier 2. A very modest research base exists on interventions for these children at tier 3, where intensive, sustained small group or individual literacy tutoring is deployed in RtI models. Al Otaiba et al. (2014) identified only nine reasonably well-executed studies. Griffiths and Stuart (2013) described only promising case studies. Arias-Gundín and Llamazares (2021) systematically reviewed tiered interventions and reported finding three mixed Tier 2/Tier 3 interventions and six Tier 3 interventions. About half of the reported studies produced no significant treatment effects. Arguably, if these children did not benefit from existing interventions, the need for new theorised approaches is clear.

Theoretical contrasts in the 2 study arms