Testing the Effectiveness, Sustainability and Scalability of an Individualized Reading Program for African-American, Latino and Euro-American Inner City Children

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project extends an individualized reading program, IRM, based on a linguistic analysis of reading errors of inner city African American children, to Latino and Euro-American school populations. In the first year of the project a comparative study will be made of the reading errors of 720 children in the 3rd and 4th grades in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and East Palo Alto, equally divided among four racial/ethnic groups: African American, Euro-American, English-reading dominant Latino, and Spanish-reading dominant Latino. The analysis will lead to interventions modeled after those developed from the IRM program. In the second year these interventions will be tested for Latino and Euro-American struggling readers. In year 3 a randomized study will be done in Philadelphia and Atlanta testing the IRM intervention within the school day, during the school day and extended day care, and without IRM but with the standard reading curriculum in all four groups of children.