Study of reading intervention programs find no benefits

Effectiveness of Selected Supplemental Reading Comprehension Interventions: Impacts on a First Cohort of Fifth-Grade Students reports on the impacts on student achievement for four supplemental reading curricula that use similar overlapping instructional strategies designed to improve reading comprehension in social studies and science text. Fifth-grade reading comprehension for each of three commercially-available curricula (Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and Read for Real) was not significantly different from the control group. The fourth curriculum, Reading for Knowledge, was adapted from Success for All for this study, and had a statistically-significant negative impact on fifth-grade reading comprehension.