Research

Research at TWU

Anne Simpson, PhD, and Annette Torres Eliais, PhD, are measuring the impact of Descubriendo La Lectura (the Spanish version of Reading Recovery^®) on first-graders in approximately 30 schools in Texas, Illinois and California thanks to a $35,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education. As a university training center responsible for Descubriendo la Lectura, Texas Woman's is also a subcontractor supporting the recruitment of schools for the grant.

Evidence of Program Success

Since its creation, the Reading Recovery program has been widely studied to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention for young children having extreme difficulty with early literacy learning. The Reading Recovery Council of North America has compiled more than 30 years of this research and evaluation as well as information on the long-term impact on participants in the program.

In 2016, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and Center for Research on Education and Social Policy (CRESP) released an independent evaluation of Reading Recovery that showed Reading Recovery students significantly outperformed students in the control group on measures of overall reading, reading comprehension and decoding.

The most recent review by What Works Clearinghouse, part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, confirmed the effectiveness of Reading Recovery in the areas of alphabetics, comprehension, reading achievement and reading fluency.