How to Evaluate a Reading Intervention Program
Reading intervention programs strive to improve the reading abilities and comprehension skills of underachieving students. School systems may operate their own programs or contract with outside providers to offer reading intervention services. Because of the importance of reading abilities to success in life, both during and beyond school, it is important for school systems to conduct program evaluations to assess the impact of interventions. An evaluation can gauge the extent to which the program improves student reading skills, as well as provide guidance for improving the interventions themselves.
Instructions
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Designing an Evaluation
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Learn about the intervention program itself, especially its goals and objectives. Read any available documents or manuals about the program to learn its basics. Then interview the program manager to learn more details about it. Knowing about the program and its objectives will inform your efforts to evaluate it.
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Find out what data the program has. Evaluating an educational intervention involves collection and analysis of relevant data. You can evaluate the program with greater efficiency if you know what data the program already has and then supplement that with any further information you need to collect.
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Design an evaluation plan that describes the program's goals and how you will assess the extent to which it achieved them. An evaluation of an educational program, such as a reading intervention, often follows an approach similar to that of a research project, stating one or more research questions and then outlining a methodology for answering them. Your evaluation plan should include measurable goals and the data you collect and analyze should measure whether the program reached those goals.
Conducting an Evaluation
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Assess the implementation of the program itself, describing how the reading intervention program served its target population. Interview or survey the program's instructors, tutors and other personnel responsible for delivering intervention services to students. You also can examine instructional materials and books used by the program.
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Collect all relevant data you will use for evaluating the program. Important data for a reading intervention program will include information on the students served. This includes the number of students; demographic and school characteristics (these include, but are not limited to, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, school attended, grade level and previous reading scores on standardized tests); and level of participation in the intervention, such as number of hours in which they were tutored.
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Analyze all data and report appropriate outcome measures for the reading intervention program. Because many of these programs work with students with limited reading skills, an appropriate outcome measure would be to analyze the reading scores of participating students, as measured by standardized achievement tests, compared to the reading scores of a similar group of nonparticipating students. To improve the validity of the evaluation, the comparison group (or control group) should consist of students with similar demographic and academic achievement characteristics.
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