Reading intervention is an intensive instructional program that helps students build core components of reading, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension. These programs use explicit, structured instruction and offer student practice with corrective feedback and aligned student materials.
Teachers begin by administering a universal screener and then give diagnostic assessments to identify skills that need to be retaught. Students are placed into small groups to receive individualized reading intervention instruction.
Group Reading Interventions
Intensive small-group reading interventions offer multiple benefits to students. These include increased opportunities for practice and high quality instruction. Moreover, these interventions can help to promote collaboration and peer interaction among students.
Studies reported reading and behavioral/social skill outcomes for students in Grades K-12. Interventions included phonics, PA and phonics, phonics and fluency, and multicomponent comprehension. Improvements in reading measures were consistent, but improvements in behavioral/social skills were not.
The most effective group reading interventions were those targeted to a specific skill or deficit, like decoding inventories and fluency screeners. This type of targeted approach can ensure that weaker readers have access to grade-level text, which can build their content knowledge and improve their ability to comprehend what they read. Another option is pairing weaker and stronger readers to read together, as supported by experimental studies. This can provide a model of what strong readers do and encourage weaker readers to practice with more experienced peers.
Individual Reading Interventions
Students who are far below grade level often require supplemental and intensive reading interventions to improve their skills. These individualized instruction strategies are typically delivered by reading specialists or teachers who have undergone extensive training to help them understand the programs and methods they will use with students.
Reading intervention programs build components of the reading process, including phonological awareness, alphabetic principle or phonics, decoding practice, building vocabulary, and comprehension skills. These programs typically involve small groups of students receiving instruction in a classroom or lab setting and are usually conducted at the lowest possible grade levels.
Educators serve as facilitators for independent reading, encouraging children to explore literature on their own terms and developing a deep connection to it that fosters curiosity and nurtures lifelong learning. In addition, educators model independent reading behaviors, such as selecting books from a class library or choosing from a bag of choices, and come alongside students to support their thinking through brief conferences.
Assessments
The assessment of learning, a critical intersection between teaching and reading instruction, includes evaluating how students have progressed over time. It’s also the process through which educators gain insights into teaching efficacy and exam design.
Some common assessments include pre-assessments and standardized tests. These are often administered at the beginning of a course, unit or academic year and are designed to establish a baseline for student performance.
Other assessments are designed to measure student knowledge and skills. These are known as diagnostic or standards-referenced assessments and may take the form of a standardized test or a teacher-developed assessment. These are designed to evaluate whether or not a student has successfully learned the specific knowledge and skills described in local, state or national learning standards.
Teaching Strategies
To implement reading intervention effectively, teachers need to use the strategies that are proven effective. These can include structured literacy lessons, which provide direct instruction in the five components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle or phonics, fluency and vocabulary.
Using a variety of methods, structured literacy lessons focus on the relationship between letters and sounds. They teach students to rhyming, segment and blend letter sounds, as well as to sound out words. These skills are important for decoding and spelling.
In addition, they can also focus on high-frequency words and teaching students how to break down words into syllables to improve their reading fluency. Finally, they can help build comprehension by teaching students how to make inferences, visualize stories and think about the meaning behind what they read. To assess student progress, teachers give formative assessments and diagnostic assessments. These can be standardized, like the universal screener, or teacher-created, such as a word list that students read.