Instruction in District-Designed Intensive Summer Reading Programs

Abstract

This study reports on the instruction provided in district-designed intensive summer reading programs. The Tier 3 intervention was provided to 374 students from 24 school districts who were not meeting the end of third-grade reading benchmarks; students were exiting third grade and entering fourth grade. Observations of the 40 classes were conducted near the beginning, middle, and end of the average 23 days of instruction, and analyzed to capture the proportion of time spent in various instructional groupings (e.g., whole class, small group) and components (e.g., phonological awareness, comprehension). Findings revealed that most time was spent in whole-class instruction, despite the need to offer students a more intensive intervention. Only two thirds of instructional time was spent specifically in reading-related activities. Approximately 30% of literacy instruction was code-focused (e.g., phonics), and 70% was meaning-focused (e.g., comprehension). The discussion addresses the alignment of observations with prior research on effective instruction and implications for designing future district-designed intensive summer reading programs.

A Virtual Tutoring Program to Increase Students’ Text Reading Fluency

“…Efforts to address the reading gap and prevent students from LD classification have included the delivery of systematic, explicit, and intensive reading interventions using multi-tiered systems of supports (MTSS; Gersten et al, 2009). With limitations to the amount of time and personnel available to deliver these additional tiers of instruction during the regular school day, researchers have turned to out-of-school opportunities such as home-based tutoring, summer school instruction (Folsom et al, 2019; Logan et al, 2019), and after-school reading interventions (Katzir et al, 2013). There has been a focus on the need for high-impact tutoring that includes (a) substantial time allocated to tutoring each week, (b) strong relationships between students and their tutors, (c) close monitoring of skills and students’ progress, and (d) supervision of tutors to ensure quality interactions (Robinson & Loeb, 2021).…”