An investigation of the effects of a comprehensive reading intervention on the beginning reading skills of first graders at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of a comprehensive reading intervention on the beginning reading skills of elementary students at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). Forty-seven first grade students (28 experimental, 19 comparison) who were formally screened and determined to be at risk for EBD participated in the study. Participants randomly assigned to the experimental condition received the standard reading curriculum plus an intensive supplemental reading intervention [i.e., Sound Partners (Vadasy, Wayne, O'Connor, Jenkins, & Pool, 1996)]. Sound Partners is an evidence-based, comprehensive, and intensive 100-lesson intervention that offers systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, letter-sound relationships, word identification, text reading, and writing. Participants in the comparison condition received the standard reading curriculum and a social adjustment intervention. A pre/post experimental group design was used to address the following research question: What effects did the Sound Partners reading intervention have on the beginning reading skills of first grade students at risk for EBD? Results indicated that (1) the reading intervention was implemented with fidelity, and (2) participants in the experimental condition generally showed statistically and educationally significant improvements in measured reading skills across one standardized and three curriculum-based measures of beginning reading skills. Statistically significant differences were determined for one cluster (i.e., basic skills) and an overall reading score (i.e., total reading) of the standardized measure [i.e., Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised-Normative Update (Woodcock, 1998)]. Statistically significant differences were also determined for all three curriculum-based measures (i.e., nonsense word fluency, phoneme segmentation fluency, and oral reading fluency) of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacyeracy Skills (Good & Kaminski, 2002). Treatment effects were moderate to large in magnitude. Effect sizes ranged from 0.60 for both a curriculum-based measure of phonemic awareness and a standardized measure of reading comprehension to 0.87 for a curriculum-based measure of alphabetic principle. Implications, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed.