Criteria of Successful Intervention Programs

From The Essential Guide to Selecting and UsingCore Reading Programs

Dewitz, Leahy, Jones and Sullivan (2010)

According to the work of Wanzek and Vaughn (2007), early intervention programs that

begin in kindergarten or first grade are more successful than those geared for the later grades.

Programs that are successful work with students for more than five months and up to a year.

There was little evidence that short intervention programs yielded strong results. Intervention is

more effective when the size of the instructional group is smaller. One-on-one intervention is the

most potent, but Wanzek and Vaughn did not locate enough small-group studies to make a

meaningful comparison to one-on-one instruction. Finally, Wanzek and Vaughn compared

interventions that were quite standardized to those more under the day-to-day control of the

teacher and found that they have no important differences in their impact.

To look deeper into the characteristics of successful intervention programs, specifically

the instruction, we decided to look at the following criteria (Coyne, Kame’enui, & Simmons,

2001). These are informed opinions; the authors did not statistically compare different types of

interventions. Strong intervention programs exhibit the following characteristics:

Conspicuous instruction in strategies: It is not enough for students to know letter sounds; they must have a strategy or process to use that knowledge. Teachers must make these strategies clear and model them explicitly.

Mediated scaffolding: The student needs support when learning new skills or strategies. Sometimes the core reading program provides that support—easier letters and sounds are introduced before more difficult patterns—and sometimes the teacher provides that support. Through coaching, hints, and modeling, the teacher helps the student try out the new strategy.

Strategy integration: Students should always understand that the separate skills of reading are not isolated. Phonemic awareness needs to be taught alongside decoding so that students understand that segmenting and blending sounds leads to ease in recognizing words. Phonemic awareness and decoding need to be taught along with

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reading of connected text. Through this integration the whole process makes sense to the students.

• Primed background knowledge: Students with reading problems often have memory deficits, so previous knowledge and skills should be reviewed before new ideas are introduced. To spell, the student has to first segment the sounds in the word. Priming causes the student to think about segmenting before beginning to spell.

Judicious review: Students with reading problems need considerable review. Coyne et al. (2001) remind us that review needs to be distributed over time, cumulative, and varied. In a sense, we cannot simply assume mastery, drop a topic or skill, and move on.

• Well-paced instruction: In a good intervention the teacher is organized and several activities can be completed in a short amount of time. A well-paced lesson promotes students’ interest and attention.

Intervention Programs Available With Core Reading Programs

Starting in 2000 publishers began to offer intervention programs alongside core reading

programs. As far back as the 1980s Macmillan offered a second basal with its regular reading

program. This alternative basal essentially presented the same skills and strategies but the

students’ text was easier with readability levels half a year to a year below the main student

anthology. Houghton Mifflin developed two intervention programs, Early Success (1999),

designed for struggling first and second grade students, and Soar to Success (Cooper, 1999)

essentially a comprehension program for students who had adequate decoding but weak reading

comprehension. Soar to Success stressed both knowledge development and comprehension

strategy instruction (predicting, self-questioning, clarifying, and summarizing) through

reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). These two programs essentially stood apart from

the main core reading programs.

The Trophies (2003/2005) program developed by Harcourt also contained an intervention

program. The Intervention Reader included the same key vocabulary, but the selections that the

students read, while thematically compatible with the main anthology, were written at a lower

readability level. The lesson plans offered some options but typically the student listened to the

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teacher read the main story and then the teacher and the students worked with the Intervention

Reader. During the week they would work on decoding, increasing fluency, reading the

Intervention Reader, and engaging in the same comprehension strategies that were featured in the

main core reading program,. The phonics skills followed a relatively traditional sequence and

moved at a brisk pace; short- and long-a words were taught in the same lesson. The program did

not have a guide to gear the phonics instruction to the needs of the students.

The new core reading programs (those published after 2007) are all available with

intervention programs. Some of these programs are linked to the main core reading program, and

others stand alone. The publishers are positioning these programs as either Tier 2 or Tier 3

programs using the language of RTI. Treasures (Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 2009) has an

accompanying intervention program that has its own student text and teacher’s edition called

Triumphs, but it also has a stand-alone intervention program. Storytown (Harcourt School

Publishers, 2008/2009) has available two intervention programs. The Strategic Intervention

Program (Grade K–6) is designed for students needing some extra support, and it largely teaches

the same comprehension and vocabulary skills taught in the core program. The Intervention

Station is for students who have more difficulty learning to read. The program consists of

decodable and leveled texts, a teacher’s guide, worksheets, and manipulatives. The teacher’s

guide is a large set of detailed lessons, almost a menu, for teachers to use to bolster their

instruction and students’ achievement. The teacher can determine how long to focus on a specific

skill. Finally, Scott Foresman offers two intervention programs that accompany its Reading

Street (2008) core reading program. The lowest level program, Early Intervention in Reading, is

a tightly scripted program for kindergarten and first-grade students who are having difficulty

with basic phonemic awareness, letter recognition, letter sounds, and word reading. My

Sidewalks on Reading Street continues the instruction from first grade up through sixth.

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How to Examine Intervention Programs

Our next goal is not to review each of these intervention programs, but rather to give you the

skills to reach your own judgments. We will, however, comment on the structure of these

programs in light of what is known about effective reading intervention. There are outside

resources that can help you to evaluate an intervention program you are considering. The Florida

Center for Reading Research (www.fcrr.org) has evaluated over 100 supplemental intervention

programs and those evaluations are available on their website. The What Works Clearinghouse

(http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) has also evaluated a number of early reading intervention

programs. This site provides a measure of their effectiveness along with an estimation of the

extent and quality of the research that yielded those conclusions. Both websites are valuable, but

they have not yet evaluated most of the new interventions that accompany the core reading

programs.

To evaluate intervention programs you need to employ two kinds of criteria. First, you

need to examine the broad structural characteristics of intervention programs. These include the

grade level the programs address, the length of an instructional lesson, the full duration of the

program in weeks or month, the optimal group size of the instruction, and the training

requirements of the instructor (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007). The second set of criteria takes you

deeper into the analysis and considers how the curriculum is organized and how the instruction is

delivered. We will concentrate on just a few of the intervention programs offered by the core

reading program publishers to illustrate how the evaluation process should be conducted. We

trust that these examples will help you when you decide to critique core reading programs

yourself. Our evaluation tool for looking at intervention programs (the Reading Guide to

Program Selection) can be found online at the website for this book at www.reading.org.

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My Sidewalks on Reading Street

My Sidewalks on Reading Street from Scott Foresman (Pearson Education, 2008), is designed

for students reading significantly below grade level. My Sidewalks is part of a three tiered

system with Reading Street, the basic core program, guiding Tier 1 instruction. Early Reading

Intervention (Simmons & Kame’enui, 2003b) provides Tier 2 intervention and My Sidewalks on

Reading Street provides Tier 3 intervention. The Early Reading Intervention program is designed

for struggling kindergarten and first-grade students. After that, Levels A–E of My Sidewalks are

designed for first through fifth grades. The program is intended to help students accelerate to

their grade level by the end of the school year. My Sidewalks can be used congruently with any

core reading program. Each level includes 150 lessons that provide 30 to 45 minutes of

instruction five days a week. The children are placed in small groups of two to five students. The

program may be used in a classroom setting or as a pull-out intervention program. The group

size, duration, and grade levels meet the criteria set out by Wanzek and Vaughn (2007). My

Sidewalks was also designed to assist ELLs. We need to point out that Sharon Vaughn is both a

researcher who studied the characteristics of effective intervention programs and one of the four

listed authors for My Sidewalks.

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Table 1. Evaluation of My Sidewalks

Criteria Instruction in My Sidewalks (Level D, Volume 1)

Conspicuous strategy

instruction

The program has defined strategies, but the process underlying the strategies is

not well explained. For example, the fourth-grade level of the program

introduces the multisyllabic word strategy, but does not explain how to

determine the number of chunks in a word or how the vowel patterns can be

used to do so. Summarizing is a prominent strategy for comprehension. The

program directs teachers to model summarizing, and the language of a good

summary is provided. The teacher is not directed to explain how that summary

was constructed.

Mediated scaffolding The program and the program directions, despite the labels, do not appear to

provide a great deal of scaffolding. For example, when sequencing is introduced

as a strategy, teachers are directed to ask comprehension questions after the

students finish reading, but the concept of sequencing and signal words is not

reviewed in the discussion of the text. The same pattern occurs with other

strategies. Word recognition strategies are scaffolded when first presented, but

the teachers are not given directions on how and when to correct students.

Strategy integration The teacher directions give limited evidence of strategy integration. Some

ongoing decoding strategies—the multisyllabic word strategy—are consistently

related to the new vocabulary words, but vocabulary words are not related to

text comprehension. The decoding patterns introduced in each week are not

related to the new vocabulary words.

Primed background

knowledge

There is little evidence that knowledge is primed when new ideas or strategies

are introduced. For example, when drawing conclusions is introduced the

concept of a strategy is not discussed, nor is drawing conclusions related to

other strategies the students are already using. When new phonics features are

introduced, like r-controlled vowels, older vowel patterns do not serve as a

springboard for these new patterns.

Judicious review The amount of judicious review in the program is mixed. The phonics skills are

practiced regularly during a week, but in the subsequent weeks the program

does not direct the teacher to review what was previously taught.

Comprehension skills and strategies are regularly reviewed across the weeks.

So drawing conclusions, which is introduced in the second week of the program,

is regularly reviewed over the next 12 to 14 weeks.

Well-paced instruction The lessons appear well paced. Each can be completed in 30 to 40 minutes and

the program provides the teachers with a time parameter for each segment of

the lesson.

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Our study of My Sidewalks on Reading Street is a demonstration and is not a

comprehensive review of the whole program. We examined one grade level, looking at three of

its six units (see Table 1). We do know from independent reviews that the first part of this

program, Early Reading Intervention (Simmons & Kame’enui, 2003b), received a favorable

review from the Florida Center for Reading Research Overall our demonstration review of My

Sidewalks suggests that it meets some, but not all, of the criteria of a strong intervention

program. Teachers can certainly use the program well, but they would need to provide more skill

review, link new strategies to old strategies, and more carefully scaffold students’ attempts to

apply the strategies. In My Sidewalks, it appears that students spend more time working on skills

and less time reading texts. This lack of balance my not be appropriate for some struggling

readers who also read less within core reading programs. It is not clear what kind of training is

provided with My Sidewalks.

Strategic Intervention Resource Kit

The Strategic Intervention Resource Kit (Harcourt, 2008) is part of the new Storytown

core reading program. It, too, is part of a three-tiered system. Storytown (Harcourt School

Publishers, 2008/2009) provides classroom instruction at Tier 1. The Strategic Intervention

Resource Kit provides the Tier 2 intervention and the Intervention Station provides the Tier 3

intervention. The program provides 30 weeks of lessons that can be used in conjunction with the

main core reading program or stand alone. The program consists of a student book (the

Interactive Reader), a practice book (worksheets), a teacher guide, and some other resources like

skill cards and vocabulary cards. The program is geared for small groups of 4–6 students, and

each of the lessons can be completed in 30 minutes. The lesson each day consists of four

segments—comprehension, vocabulary, spelling/decoding, and grammar and writing. Fluency

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practice is embedded throughout the program. The order of these segments changes from day to

day. We will now apply the criteria of Coyne et al. (2001) to the Strategic Intervention Resource

Kit in Table 2

Table 2. Evaluation of Strategic Intervention Kit (Harcourt, 2008)

Criteria Instruction in Strategic Intervention Kit (Level D, Volume 1)

Conspicuous strategy

instruction

The program seems to lack explicit strategy instruction. We did not have the

skills cards where strategies are described, so we were not fully able to

evaluate this portion of the program. Decoding skills are mentioned, there is a

strong focus on the phonics features, but not on strategies for decoding words.

In terms of comprehension the program lacks the language that the teacher

would need to explain how to draw a conclusion or use text structure to

understand cause and effect.

Mediated scaffolding There is some evidence of scaffolding in the lesson, mostly in the fact that skills

repeat over several lessons. However, the program generally lacks language

that would guide a student through the use of a specific comprehension or

decoding strategy.

Strategy integration There is little evidence of strategy integration. The program does not help the

teacher explain how decoding aids comprehension, or how decoding and

vocabulary knowledge can be linked together. Skills appear to be used in

isolation from each other.

Primed background

knowledge

The program does regularly prime background knowledge of content and

concepts, but not of strategies. When new phonics or structural analysis

features are introduced they are not discussed in relationship to older features

that have been previously taught. The students are reminded of what they

should know about a comprehension strategy, but strategies are not related to

each other.

Judicious review The program does not appear to have as explicit a cycle of review as struggling

readers might need. When a comprehension skill is introduce in a lesson, it will

receive some review on subsequent days, but often the program shifts to new

skills. Phonics patterns are studied for about a week, but there is little evidence

they are reviewed in the following weeks.

Well-paced instruction The lessons are well paced. Each lesson segment appears with small clock

faces that suggests time limits. Typically the program suggests that

comprehension, decoding, vocabulary and grammar /writing can be completed

in 30 minutes.

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The Harcourt Strategic Intervention Resource Kit lacks some of the criteria outlined by

Coyne et al. (2001). To use the program well a teacher would need to provide more review of the

skills and strategies and scaffold them more carefully. The teacher would also need to provide

more explanation of how these strategies are linked together. While using the program, a teacher

would discover if the four or five components recommended each day could be covered in the

allocated 30 minutes. When the Strategic Intervention Resource Kit is used in conjunction with

the core reading program, the sequence of instruction and review does not change but the

program does provide more support for modeling and scaffolding the skills. The Coyne et al.

criteria provide a very useful guide for examining intervention programs geared for Tier 2 and

Tie 3 instruction. Our evaluation was limited to one level of the program and schools should ask

for more components and conduct a more thorough evaluation on their own.

Effective criteria can be used to evaluate intervention programs that supplement core

reading programs. When the programs stand alone the criteria developed by Coyne et al. (2001)

are a useful guide in examining the intervention programs. These criteria, when used carefully,

can reveal if instruction is explicit, well-scaffolded, and accompanied by sufficient review. The

strongest example is Early Reading Intervention (Simmons & Kame’enui, 2003b). The singular

focus on phonemic awareness, letter sounds, and word reading make extensive review, strong

scaffolding, and quick pacing possible. Programs that are linked or integrated with the core

reading programs are more difficult to evaluate because the characteristics of their instruction are

dependent on the quality of those programs. The success of any of these programs depends not

only on their curriculum and instruction but on the knowledge of the teachers (Piasta, Connor,

Fishman, & Morrison, 2009).

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