Page 54 - S44 Compendium

Disability • Ethnicity • Independent Measure
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THREE PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS: IN, MA, MI
STUDY PROFILE
Evaluation Period: 2009–2010
Grades: 3–11
Assessment: Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III), Test of Word Reading Ef ciency (TOWRE), Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI)
Participants: N=85
Implementation: 50 to 90 minutes daily (Stand-Alone)
OVERVIEW
During the 2009–2010 school year, three public school districts in central Indiana, eastern Massachusetts, and southeastern Michigan piloted System 44 for their most challenged readers who had not yet mastered basic phonics and decoding skills. Total student enrollment in these three urban districts varied from 12,220 to 16,536 students, representing a diverse mix of English language learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. Across the three districts, a
total of 331 students participated in System 44 during the 2009–2010 school year. Of the 85 students with disabilities, 30 (35%) were elementary school students, 35 (41%) were middle school students, and 20 (24%) were high school students. The multisite sample varied ethnically: 40% of the students were Hispanic, 25% were Caucasian, 25% were African American, and 10% were multiethnic.
A total of 85 System 44 third- through eleventh-grade students with disabilities across the three districts comprise the sample in this report. Students were placed into System 44 if they scored below 400 Lexile (L) measures on SRI and exhibited dif culty with word-reading skills on SPI. A stand-alone model was used in all three districts. In one district, System 44 was implemented in a 60-minute classroom period that started with a 10-minute whole-group introduction, followed by 25-minute rotations on the instructional software and in small-group instruction. In
the other two districts, System 44 classroom periods ranged from 50 to 90 minutes. In all of these classrooms, students participated in whole-group and small-group instruction and were expected to use the software for at least 25 minutes a day. For the purposes of this analysis, all models were analyzed together.
Students with disabilities demonstrate signi cant improvement in decoding and reading achievement.
RESULTS
Fall 2009 and spring 2010 Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III), Test of Word Reading Ef ciency (TOWRE), and SRI data were gathered from 85 System 44 students with disabilities. Results showed that the System 44 students with disabilities revealed signi cant improvements in both word-reading and reading comprehension skills. After participation in System 44, students in the sample averaged a statistically signi cant standard score gain of 3 points on the Basic Reading Skills (BRS) cluster of the WJ III, a test that measures word-identi cation skills and pro ciency in applying phonics and structural analysis to the pronunciation
of unfamiliar printed words. Students demonstrated a gain of 2 points on the TOWRE Total Word Reading Ef ciency, the subtest that measures students’ ability to recognize sight words and “sound out” nonwords (Table 1).
Additionally, an evaluation of changes in grade equivalent scores on the WJ III Basic Reading Skills cluster showed that from 2009 to 2010, the percentage of students with disabilities performing at the fourth-grade equivalent or higher more than doubled,
from 11% to 26% (Graph 1). Overall, System 44 students with disabilities demonstrated a signi cant improvement in reading comprehension on SRI. On average, the 71 System 44 students with pretest and posttest SRI Lexile data advanced from 157L in the fall to 241L in the spring, a signi cant gain of 84L (Graph 2).