Paraprofessional Instructional Assistants Raise the Reading Performance of Latina/o First Graders in a Low-Income District

Abstract

One relatively low-cost mechanism to assist teachers serving many English learner (EL) students and struggling readers is to hire, train, and manage paraprofessionals to provide supplementary instruction to such students. This study evaluated a program in which one district provided instructional aides to all first-grade teachers in the lowest-performing schools. To estimate program effects on reading, we used matched comparison schools in two research designs. One was a comparative interrupted time-series design, which compared school-level test score averages for treatment and comparison schools before and after program implementation. The other analyzed student-level test scores in these schools before and after the program. Both yielded positive estimates of program effects, significant at the p < .10 and p < .05 levels.