Reading intervention provides students who need additional support with targeted, focused instruction. It addresses a student’s weaknesses identified on school-wide screenings, as well as their individual needs in specific areas like phonics, fluency, and comprehension.
Building background knowledge, identifying text structure, and teaching morphological awareness are all essential components of reading intervention.
Group Reading Interventions
Intensive small-group reading interventions focus on building phonological awareness, phonics, decoding and fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These group interventions also provide opportunities for students to interact with one another and support each other’s learning.
Research has shown that intensive small-group reading interventions can improve standardized norm-referenced outcomes on word reading and decoding, reading comprehension and spelling. The impact on behavioral and social skills is less clear.
A recent meta-analysis and synthesizer of reading intervention research found that while all interventions reported improvements on reading measures, the effects on behavior and social skill measures were not consistent across the different types of reading interventions studied.
Moreover, studies that include multiple reading intervention types have shown that students receive more benefit from intensive, structured literacy instruction (such as small-group instruction) than unstructured, flexible instruction. In addition, they are more likely to be able to progress from low to high performing levels if they receive instruction that is tailored to their needs.
Individual Reading Interventions
Teachers can offer individual reading interventions to students who require more attention and individualized instruction. This can be accomplished by assigning them to a special reading intervention class, offering extra time in their classroom for reading instruction, or providing a teacher for one-on-one reading instruction.
Individual reading interventions should be tailored to students’ unique needs, such as code-focused instruction focusing on decoding and spelling skills or meaning-focused instruction that encourages readers to link what they have decoded to their prior knowledge. The individualized nature of these reading interventions can promote a positive teacher-student relationship, which is essential to student motivation and progress.
Often, reading interventions are structured according to a tiered system with different levels of support based on a student’s individual learning needs. To ensure the effectiveness of these programs, it is critical that teachers have access to the proper training, resources, and tools. For example, Voyager Sopris provides an extensive library of reading activities and lessons that can be customized to students’ needs.
Formative Assessments
The use of formative assessments, which involve providing students constant feedback and modifying instruction based on student needs, has received growing attention from educators and researchers. Teachers can implement formative assessment through a number of different methods such as thought-revealing activities, generative activities, model-eliciting activities, and strategies for computer-supported collaborative learning environments.
Formative assessments can be used to identify concepts that students do not understand, skill sets and capabilities that are not being met, or learning standards that have not been achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. They can also be used to assess students’ current knowledge and identify misconceptions before teaching takes place.
Summative assessments, on the other hand, are employed at the end of an academic period to evaluate a student’s progress toward course learning objectives through measurable outcomes. They can take the form of exams, papers, projects, and presentations. These are formally graded and may be weighted heavily in the overall class grade.
Diagnostic Assessments
Diagnostic assessments are low-stakes, usually a quick multiple choice test, and they don’t contribute to grades. Educators may use them to help identify students’ strengths, weaknesses and knowledge levels before beginning a new learning unit. These are sometimes called formative assessments.
They can also compare student performance within a class, school or district to that of pupils nationally. For example, a teacher might discover that a significant number of her students lack morphological awareness (the ability to recognize prefixes, suffixes and bases in words) by assessing students’ performance on the Star Phonics diagnostic assessment.
The information gathered by diagnostic assessments enables teachers to differentiate lessons and focus on the components of reading intervention that are needed for each individual student, such as phonics, word recognition and decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This is similar to the stair-step approach of structured literacy instruction described above. Like Goldilocks’ porridge, diagnostic assessment data helps teachers present content that is “just right” for each student.