No abstract

Preventative and intensive reading intervention can be administered to at‐risk students in a systematic way to help facilitate gains on literacy outcomes. Despite this fact, there are clear barriers to implementation. One solution may be to use paraprofessionals to provide supplemental reading instruction. This study employed meta‐analytic procedures to address two questions: (a) what is the overall effectiveness of paraprofessionals as implementers of reading interventions? and (b) in which areas are paraprofessionals most effective? A literature search of research from 2001 to 2017 yielded 76 studies. Nine studies meeting a priori inclusion criteria were coded for demographic information and six common reading outcomes. The mean ES across outcomes was 0.55, and spelling and decoding emerged as areas to inform future research. Although these meta‐analytic findings must be interpreted with caution due to issues of sample size and heterogeneity of variance, involving paraprofessionals as reading interventionists appears to be a highly promising strategy.

Suppose you are a beginning second-grade teacher who is experiencing great difficulty with a student named Jerry. It seems Jerry is out of controldisrupting children around him and interfering with your attempts to teach the class. To deal with this situation, you decide to meet with the school psychologist, Dr. Smith. In the first session, Dr. Smith asks you to describe in observable terms what you mean by Jerry being "disruptive" and "interfering." In reply to her series of questions, you inform Dr. Smith that Jerry (a) is generally a capable student but often leaves his seat for several minutes at a time while you are busy working with a small group, and he is among the students who are supposed to be doing independent math work, and (b) repeatedly calls out answers without raising his hand when you are teaching phonics. Dr. Smith then asks you to describe what is going on in the classroom before, during, and after Jerry leaves his seat and blurts out answers. This meeting ends with Dr. Smith's request that you keep track of how often these two problem