Intervention works!

Well, the results are finally in and, after reviewing all the data, it looks as though the interventions we put into place had a positive effect.

I did have to make a few changes to my original plan, however, which while changing the scope of the research did not significantly alter the goal - to determine if intervention was going to make a difference for those students at risk of not passing the NJ ASK.

In order to limit the scope of the research and make it manageable, I decided to focus on just one grade - fourth - and work with the interventions that the teachers in that grade felt were most necessary for the students they chose.

And, when the results were analyzed, the test group did very well - having their scores rise over 11% from the previous year, with 50% of the group exceeding the Passing threshold and the remainder falling just short. Not a bad result for only 10 weeks of intervention.

The control group also improved, but not nearly as much. And what was more surprising was the the higher-scoring group from third grade did not improve nearly as much. In fact, 30% of those students ended up falling below the Passing threshold.

So, targeted intensive interventions can make a difference in language arts scores. Exactly what I had hoped to see.

In my next post, I will outline what I would have done differently and what I would like to see going forward.

Where is all the research??

While reading instruction is among the hottest topics in educational circles, and while standardized testing seems to be the key topic among conversation among those both within and outside of education, amazingly there is a huge lack of available research on the effects of supplemental instruction on improving reading test scores.

RTI is clearly the topic of the day and there are scores of articles and studies documenting the rise of this 3 tiered strategy that aims to improve instruction for all students by delivering increasingly intense interventions for students at varying levels of need. However, there is very little available that outlines the aftermath of these interventions in any detail.

This lack of resources has made completing my own action research a real challenge as there is very little for me to refer back to. And yet, despite this, the initial returns on my own research are indicating that interventions, implemented across a grade level and delivered with consistency, can improve test scores. I find this to be rather encouraging.