Experimental Effects of the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention on Reading Performance in High Poverty Middle Schools

The roughly one-quarter of U.S. eighth graders who score below basic on national assessments of reading are poorly equipped for the reading demands of secondary school. They struggle with summarizing and making text-based inferences (NCES, 2013). Intervention in middle school needs to be comprehensive, both because of the heterogeneity of the population of struggling readers and because of the interdependence of components of reading. This study presents preliminary results of a clinical trial of a new multi-component program, the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI). Four Massachusetts school districts served as research sites: two large urban districts, District A and B, and two rural/suburban districts, District C and D. Districts volunteered to be part of the study and solicited schools to participate (in the case of the larger districts) or had all their middle schools participate in the two smaller districts. In each of the participating schools, students scoring below proficient on the state ELA assessment were eligible to participate in STARI. Students in substantially separate special education classes, students who were level 1 or 2 English language learners, and students whose special education plan included intensive, rules-based phonics intervention, were excluded from study participation. Questions guiding the analysis were: (1) What is the intention-to-treat (ITT) estimate of STARI on the Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation (RISE) for a sample of struggling readers in Grades 6 to 8?; and (2) What is the treatment-on-the treated (TOT) estimate of STARI on the RISE subtests? Evaluation results of STARI suggest that a multi-component Tier-2 intervention for struggling adolescent readers can improve a range of reading outcomes including students' ability to decode words, to read connected text with speed and accuracy, to improve their knowledge of word parts, and to improve sentence and text-level comprehension outcomes. By the middle grades, it may be critical to engage struggling readers with curriculum units that tap student interests and provide opportunities to talk about text with teachers and peers. Tables are appended.