Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

success of the programme appears to be inversely related to the severity of the reading
problem.” (Reynolds and Wheldall, 2007, pp.218-9).
In 2002, 31 eminent reading researchers in the USA wrote an open letter to members of
the US Congress detailing the following concerns regarding the adoption of Reading
Recovery in US schools (Baker et al., 2002): 1) Lack of good evidence for the success of
Reading Recovery with its targeted population, i.e. the lowest performing pupils. The
letter highlighted the exclusion of 25%–40% of the poorest performing students from
data analyses carried out in non-independent evaluations; 2) Reading Recovery was not
a cost-effective solution because of the high cost of training and the insistence on oneto-one
tuition when, it was argued, small group tuition has been shown to be just as
effective; 3) The excessive costs of Reading Recovery could make it more difficult for
schools to provide help for all children who were in need, particularly those children
older than the range targeted by Reading Recovery; 4) Reading Recovery efficacy
studies did not use standard assessment measures, but instead used their own nonstandard
measures, which were also used to determine which students were to be
included in the sample, thereby inflating outcomes; 5) Reading Recovery had been
resistant to integrating the findings of independent, scientific research, particularly
concerning the importance of explicit teaching of phonics; although Reading Recovery
did include some phonics within its methods, this instruction was not regarded by the
authors of this letter as being sufficiently explicit.
It should be emphasised that these concerns applied to Reading Recovery programmes
in the USA at that time. They are mentioned here not only because of the unusual
prominence of this particular letter to Congress, but also because Reading Recovery
here is rooted in the approach as delivered internationally, and it is necessary to
consider whether these criticisms also apply to Reading Recovery as currently provided
in England (both within ECaR and more generally).
The analysis of studies on Reading Recovery in the rest of this chapter will follow a
similar sequence to that adopted for phonologically-based studies earlier in this report,
that is, the strongest studies (randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental
studies) from the rest of the world are analysed first, followed by studies conducted in
Britain. The reason for this separation is, again, that no relevant RCTs have been
conducted in Britain. (Within the study carried out in London and Surrey in the 1990s
there was an RCT, but it compared children receiving and not receiving the alternative
intervention, Phonological Training, and did not involve those receiving Reading
Recovery.)
5.2.2 RCT and quasi-experimental studies of Reading Recovery
A review by the What Works Clearinghouse (2007a) in the USA identified 78 studies on
Reading Recovery, of which just four were RCTs which met their evidence standards in
full, and one (the Iversen and Tunmer, 1993 study referred to above) was a quasiexperimental
study which met the evidence standards with reservations. The Hatcher et
al. (1994) study is not listed among the studies that did not meet the evidence
standards, presumably because its Reading-only condition was not explicitly called
Reading Recovery. All five included studies were conducted in the USA, at dates
between the mid 1980s and the start of this decade (thus three of the studies were
conducted before the addition of phonics to the programme).
Intervention for Dyslexia 101