I'll start with Kevin's observations which he concludes with at the end of his piece:
Read Kevin's piece here:So, let’s be clear about this. The children who received Reading Recovery did not perform significantly better than the comparison students from the same school who had not received Reading Recovery. (Note: no details of statistical significance testing or effect sizes are reported for these comparisons.)
But the Conclusions section of the report states (and this is the only conclusion iterated):
“These findings indicate that effects of Reading Recovery are still apparent at the end of Year 6 and that even the children who attended Reading Recovery schools but were not offered the programme benefited somewhat from the ECaR programme.” (P. 22)
It is a source of some consternation to reflect on the fact that neither the report’s author (Hurry) nor the writers of ‘Best Evidence in Brief’ appear to have considered the (to me) obvious alternative conclusion: that there is no need to actually take part in Reading Recovery; merely attending a Reading Recovery school appears to be sufficient!
Another interpretation of these data is that they provide no evidence for the long term efficacy of Reading Recovery because those children in the school who did receive Reading Recovery performed no better than those who did not. And both of these groups performed better than the comparison children in the non-Reading Recovery schools. In other words, there is no discernable effect for the program per se, only for differences between schools. Moreover, even the significant differences between the two groups in the Reading Recovery Schools and the non-Reading Recovery school are accompanied by only small effect sizes, all of which are below Hattie’s hinge value of 0.4
Considering the huge expense involved in one to one Reading Recovery tutoring, these are very small bangs for very big bucks.
Small Bangs for Big Bucks: The long term efficacy of Reading Recovery
http://www.kevinwheldall.com/2013/02/sm ... -term.html