Introduction
By the late 1980's reading researchers were aware of the associations between phoneme awareness (i.e., the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words) and reading ability, whether measured concurrently or used to predict reading achievement one or more years later (Juel, 1988; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1988; Share, Jorm et al., 1984). Because this relationship was stronger than those between reading and child characteristics that were known to be difficult to change, such as IQ or socioeconomic status, researchers experimented with instructional studies in which children were taught to blend or segment spoken words and the impact on reading development was assessed (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bus & Ijzendoorn, 1999; O'Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1995; Torgesen, Morgan, & Davis, 1992). The collection of experiments suggested that phoneme awareness could be taught to children who did not acquire it naturally, and that doing so generated small but reliable effects on reading words.
Researchers began to consider whether early intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge might decrease the incidence or severity of RD (O'Connor, 2000; Torgesen, 2000), however, two problems soon became apparent. First, the children who might benefit from early intervention needed to be identified in kindergarten or first grade, much earlier than is common within systems of special education. The prediction efforts that used measures of phoneme awareness in kindergarten to identify children who might develop reading disability (RD; Good, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 2001; O'Connor & Jenkins, 1999; Wagner et al., 1997) netted a much larger percentage of children than the incidence of RD, often two to three times as many children as will actually struggle with learning to read. This overprediction occurs in virtually all prediction efforts, and so advocates of early intervention suggest that the intervention that occurs as a result of the prediction should be flexible, so that children who are incorrectly selected can be released from the prediction net (Jenkins & O'Connor, 2002). Second, although early intervention in reading is often successful, it can also be costly. In many of the studies, instruction has been delivered in small groups or through individual tutoring, which can be difficult to manage in general education environments.
Resolving these problems suggests a model of intervention in which general class teachers become the first layer of an intervention effort. By the late 1990's, we (along with other research teams) began experimenting with models of intervention that incorporated frequent measurement of children's reading progress with improvements in classroom teaching brought about by ongoing professional development for teachers in kindergarten and First Grade (Blachman et al., 1999; O'Connor, 2000; O'Connor, Notari-Syverson, & Vadasy, 1996). The combination of professional development and direct intervention with children appeared to reduce the proportion of poor readers in our sample (O'Connor, 2000), however, we were also aware that the 40% identified as at risk in kindergarten included substantial overprediction of reading problems, and that the 12% who remained poor readers at the end of First Grade could increase as reading becomes more complex.
To obtain a more accurate estimate of the effects of early intervention on RD, it would be important to follow students' reading progress and perhaps to continue intervention efforts beyond First Grade. The current study, funded by the Office of Special Education Projects, began in 1999. We used historical control groups of second and third graders in 2 schools to ease the confound of teachers effects, and tested the additive effects of ongoing professional development for teachers and direct intervention with children on children's reading development and placement in special education over their first four years of schooling--Grades K-3.
Previous Page | Next Page
Abstract | Method
