Abstract
A major achievement of reading research has been the development of effective intervention programs for struggling readers. Most intervention studies employ a pre-post design, to examine efficacy, but this precludes the study of growth curves over the course of the intervention program. Determining the time-course of improvement is essential for cost-effective, evidence-based decisions on the optimal intervention dosage. The goal of this study was to analyze reading growth curves during an intensive summer intervention program. A cohort of 31 children (6–12 years) with reading difficulties (N = 21 with dyslexia diagnosis) were enrolled in 160 h of intervention occurring over 8 weeks of summer vacation. We collected behavioral measures over 4 sessions assessing decoding, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. Mixed-effects modeling of longitudinal measurements revealed a linear dose-response relationship between hours of intervention and improvement in reading ability; there was significant linear growth on every measure of reading skill and none of the measures showed non-linear growth trajectories. Decoding skills showed substantial growth [Cohen’s d = 0.85 (WJ Basic Reading Skills)], with fluency and comprehension growing more gradually [d = 0.41 (WJ Reading Fluency)]. These results highlight the opportunity to improve reading skills over an intensive, short-term summer intervention program, and the linear dose-response relationship between duration and gains enables educators to set reading level goals and design a treatment plan to achieve them.
Highlights
The most common learning disability in school-aged youth, developmental dyslexia, affects between 5 and 17% of children (Elliott and Grigorenko, 2014)
Longitudinal measurements of reading skills were conducted for 31 children who participated in an intensive summer reading intervention program (Lindamood-Bell Seeing Stars, see section “Materials and Methods”)
Using a mixed effects model to compare growth rates between the binned timed and untimed reading measures we found that untimed measures (Woodcock Johnson IV, Word Attack (WA), Letter-Word Identification (LWID)) showed more rapid growth than timed measures [TOWRE, Sight Word Efficiency (SWE), Phonemic Decoding Efficiency (PDE)] (β = 1.87, t(60) = 4.68, p = 1.67 × 10−5)
Summary
The most common learning disability in school-aged youth, developmental dyslexia, affects between 5 and 17% of children (Elliott and Grigorenko, 2014). Summer Intervention Drives Linear Growth achievement (Raskind et al, 1999; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2006), a large body of scientific research has focused on the development of effective treatments for developmental dyslexia. The importance of intensive, early intervention is clear (Wanzek and Vaughn, 2007; Lovett et al, 2017), the reality remains that access to effective intervention is both a financial and emotional burden for families of struggling readers, especially during the school year (Delany, 2017). We can characterize intervention-driven learning trajectories over an isolated period of time without the confounding influence of concurrent educational activities and inform cost-effective decision-making on the appropriate duration of a summer intervention
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