Efficacy of an Online Reading Intervention Program “Literacy Pro” in Classifying Students as “At Risk” and “Not at Risk” among ESL School Students—A Logistic Regression Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to test the classification accuracy of an online reading comprehension program “Literacy Pro” in classifying students as “at risk” and “not at risk”. Data was collected from the school records of an international school operating in Dubai, UAE. The students of this school are non-native English speakers or they learn English as a Second Language (ESL). The sample was taken from two grades—grade 7 and grade 10. A logistic regression analysis (simple and multiple) was done to test the classification accuracy in terms of the sensitivity and specificity rule. The results of the current study show a sensitivity level of 0.76 and 0.94 for grade 7 and 10 respectively, whereas the corresponding specificity levels are 0.99 and 0.97 respectively. The overall accuracy of the model for grade 7 and 10 is 89.9% and 94.4% respectively in simple logistic regression whereas the corresponding values are 89.9% and 95.6% in multiple logistic regressions. Therefore, it can be concluded that the reading intervention measure of “Literacy Pro” is highly accurate in classifying students as “at risk” and “not at risk”. The area under the curve (AUC) value was obtained as 0.8754 and 0.9512 for grade 7 and 10 respectively for the ROC curves of the model. Hence, the classification accuracy of grade 10 is excellent and that of grade 7 is good as per the generally accepted standards for the online reading comprehension program “Literacy Pro”.