This article describes a follow-up study that experimentally evaluated the effects of supplemental reading instruction for children in kindergarten through Grade 3. Students from 10 elementary schools in three school districts were screened using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. Two hundred fifty-six K-2 students were identified for participation, then randomly assigned to receive or not receive 2 years of supplemental reading instruction that taught basic decoding and comprehension skills. Reading ability was measured in the fall prior to the first year of the intervention and again in the spring of Years 1, 2, and 3. At the end of the 2-year intervention, children who received the supplemental instruction performed better on measures of word attack, word identification, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. One year after the intervention, children in the supplemental instruction group still showed greater improvement in word attack and oral reading fluency than the comparison students.

This article discusses a study that experimentally evaluated the effects of supplemental instruction in reading for students in kindergarten through Grade 3. Using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) and a measure of oral reading fluency, 256 students in kindergarten through second grade (158 Hispanic, 98 non-Hispanic) were screened. Students were then randomly assigned to receive or not receive supplemental reading instruction focused on phonological awareness and decoding skills. Reading skill was assessed in the fall of the first year of participation and again in the spring of Years 1 and 2 (Times 2 and 3). Children who received the supplemental reading instruction performed significantly better on measures of word attack skills at Time 2 and on measures of word attack, word identification, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension at Time 3. There were no differences in the effectiveness of instruction as a function of Hispanic students' level of English proficiency or as a function of student gender or grade.

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This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letterword identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure. Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic StudentsThe long-term impact of reading failure on school success is well established (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998;Juel, 1988;Slavin et al., 1996). So, too, is the relation between learning to read in the primary grades and the development of reading ability throughout elementary school (Francis, Shaywitz, Steubing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996;Juel, 1988). Reading acquisition is frequently viewed as a "bottom-up" process, based on the development of word recognition skills to promote fluency and comprehension (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pestsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). Within this framework, fluent word recognition allows the reader to allocate increased attention to key comprehension processes, such as making meaningful connections between sentences within a passage or relating text meaning to prior experiences and information (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). Thus, learning how to decode text provides a requisite foundation not only for reading fluency but also for higher-level comprehension processes.Evidence from 20 years of reading research points to the development of fluent word recognition skills as the biggest difficulty that students face in learning to read (Share & Stanovich, 1995). In particular, theories of word recognition (Ehri, 1998; Please send correspondence concerning this article to: Barbara Gunn, Ph.D., Oregon Research Institute, 1715 Franklin Blvd., Eugene, OR 97403-1983, Telephone: 541.484.2123/fax: 541.484.1108. E-mail: barbarag@ori.org. Grant #DA 09678 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse supported the preparation of this manuscript. The authors thank Christine Cody and ...

This paper described the short-term results from an ongoing randomized controlled efficacy study of Click City ® : Tobacco, a tobacco prevention program designed for 5 th graders, with a booster in sixth grade. Click City ® : Tobacco is an innovative school-based prevention program delivered via an intranet, a series of linked computers with a single server. The components of the program target theoretically based and empirically supported etiological mechanisms predictive of future willingness and intentions to use tobacco and initiation of tobacco use. Each component was designed to change one or more etiological mechanisms and was empirically evaluated in the laboratory prior to inclusion in the program. Short-term results from 47 elementary schools (24 schools who used Click City ® : Tobacco, and 23 who continued with their usual curriculum) showed change in intentions and willingness to use tobacco from baseline to one-week following the completion of the 5 th grade sessions. The results demonstrate the short-term efficacy of this program and suggest that experimentally evaluating components prior to including them in the program contributed to the efficacy of the program. The program was most efficacious for students who were most at risk.