Supplementary Reading Programs Found Ineffective

A federal study intended to provide insight on the effectiveness of supplementary programs for reading comprehension found that three such programs had no positive impact, while a fourth had a negative effect on student achievement.

In other words, the report concludes that none of the four programs studied—Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge—is effective.

The large-scale randomized controlled study involved 6,350 students, who were all 5th graders, and 268 teachers in 10 urban districts with large numbers of disadvantaged students. The 89 schools in the study were randomly assigned either to use one of the reading curricula being reviewed or...