Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

very little progress in their first year of school, and that without intervention they might
have been expected to reach a rather low level in KS1 National Curriculum assessments,
the achievement of levels 2c and above should be regarded as good progress. On this
revised criterion of National Curriculum assessments performance, the percentage
becomes nearly 70%.
5.4 Quasi-experimental research studies on Reading
Recovery in the UK
All the UK studies so far mentioned are single-group studies; that is, they gathered
outcome measures only from children who had received Reading Recovery and not from
any comparison or control groups. This section summarises two UK studies in which the
performance of children receiving and not receiving Reading Recovery was compared;
the first also contained an alternative intervention. (A third UK comparative study,
conducted in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, did not report results in a manner
allowing the calculation of impact measures.)
5.4.1 The London and Surrey study, 1992–96
This study was originally reported in Sylva and Hurry (1995a, b) and Hurry and Sylva
(1998), all of which have now been superseded by Hurry and Sylva (2007); this last
reference is the main basis for the following summary. It should be borne in mind that
this study took place before significant amounts of phonics were added to Reading
Recovery.
Approximately 400 children in 63 schools in London and Surrey were studied, with 95
children being assigned to Reading Recovery tuition and 97 to an alternative
intervention called Phonological Training, and the remainder belonging to comparison
groups. The schools were selected such that those in the comparison groups and those
providing Phonological Training had similar intakes to those running Reading Recovery
programmes. The participants comprised the six poorest readers in Year 2 from each
school in the age range 6 years 0 months to 6 years 6 months at the outset
(approximately the bottom 20% of readers), selected on the basis of their performance
on the Diagnostic Survey (Clay, 1985), forerunner to the Observation Survey. Some of
the comparison groups were ‘within-school controls’ (in the schools where the two
programmes were running) and the others were ‘between-school controls’ (in schools
where neither programme was running).
Children on the Reading Recovery programme received an average of 77 30-minute
sessions delivered over an average of 21 weeks, and 89% were successfully
discontinued. Children on the Phonological Training programme received sound
awareness training involving rhyme and alliteration, together with word-building
activities involving plastic letters, following the approach developed by Bradley and
Bryant (1985) and Kirtley et al. (1989), each child receiving 40 10-minute individual
sessions spread over 10 months. The measures used in the study include BAS Word
Reading and Spelling, Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, and the Oddities Test, which
measures awareness of rhyme and of initial and final phonemes (Kirtley et al., 1989).
At the first post-test on completion of intervention, it was found that, on average,
children who had received Reading Recovery had made significantly greater progress on
all measures compared with between-school controls, and on all measures except
106 Intervention for Dyslexia