READERS Intervention Program for Readers-at-Risk

This single-subject experimental study com- bined with group analysis for comparison of gains on performance developed and implemented a 10-week reading intervention program called Restructured Ap- proach in Developing Early Reading Skills (READ- ERS).For Grade One readers-at-risk. Case studies were incorporated with single-factor experiment results. Mean scores of the small group setup were compared with those of the individual subject in the one-on-one setup to determine which subjects made more gains af- ter the intervention. The study found that READERS improved the reading proficiency of the four Grade One readers-at-risk in terms of book and print awareness; mastery of the alphabet; phonemic awareness; textual read aloud; journal writing; and comprehension. It was further found that in general, READERS improved the proficiency of both setups in the six components of the program, with no significant difference between the two setups. Contrary to the conventional belief that one-on-one is the most effective instructional arrange- ment, this study found no advantage of one-on-one in- tervention over the group instruction. Findings of the study revealed that group-oriented early intervention, including some based on the RR procedures, appear to be promising and that a student grouping of 1:3 works as well as a grouping of 1:1.

Key words: reading intervention, readers-at-risk, early reading, early childhood