Researchers Find Reading Mastery Outperforms Celebrate Reading in Study with High Performing 4th Graders
Mt. Carmel Elementary – Mt. Carmel, IL
Schools everywhere face high academic standards and are charged with evaluating programs and practices to determine which will yield the best possible results for their students. They must determine which curriculum to implement across their districts and schools, a decision that becomes more difficult amid high expectations and limited budgets. Is it worth spending the money on a different program? Will the extra expenditure generate different results? These questions plagued a school in Illinois that called in researchers to help answer them. School leaders asked researchers to compare the effectiveness of the program they had been using for the past eight years, Scott Foresman’s Celebrate Reading, with another program they were considering for adoption, Reading Mastery.
In the study, researchers examined fluency and comprehension gains over one academic year in high-achieving (Tier 1) 4th graders, as measured by AIMSweb. The school of approximately 400 students was relatively high-SES, with only about one-third of students in the study qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. All participating students were white.
Which program had a greater influence on fluency rates?
Students were assigned in equal numbers to one of two groups in the study. On average, students in each group read approximately 120 correct words per minute at the start of the study; however, by spring, students in Reading Mastery outperformed those in Celebrate Reading. The Reading Mastery students gained over 50 correct words per minute, while the students in Celebrate Reading gained 30 correct words per minute on average – just over half of the gain experienced by students receiving instruction in Reading Mastery! Not only did the Reading Mastery students do well compared to their peers in the alternate program, but they gained 1.52 words per week, which exceeds the common expectation of 0.85 to 0.90 words per week (See Figure 1). In fact, the gain exceeded the standards for ambitious achievement, which range from 1.1 to 1.5 words per week!
To what extent did students’ comprehension skills improve?
Students in Reading Mastery also experienced an impressive growth in their comprehension skills. By spring, the Reading Mastery students had gained an average of nearly 13 points, while students receiving instruction in Celebrate Reading gained only eight points on average (See Figure 2).
What impact did fluency have on reading comprehension?
The researchers determined the extent to which fluency affected students’ reading comprehension. As many studies have found, students who read fluently expend less time and effort decoding words and can instead attend to the meaning of the text they are reading. The findings in this study were no different. Reading Mastery was responsible for the increase in fluency, which in turn led to improved comprehension skills. Four-fifths of the increase in comprehension among Reading Mastery students was due to improved reading fluency. The rest (one-fifth) of the increase in comprehension was a direct result of the use of Reading Mastery.
The results at Illinois are consistent with the experience of other schools implementing Reading Mastery, both with highly affluent students and high-poverty populations. Access more than 30 years of research on Direct Instruction by visiting NIFDI’s Research Database.