Project to study pupils' reading

Thursday, October 23, 2003 By Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Education Writer

Denise Morelli, a reading specialist and special education teacher, has been teaching for 20 years, but even Morelli was amazed at the progress made by some of the slowest readers in the fourth grade in Quaker Valley School District in just seven weeks.

"I would never have believed the improvement in such a short period of time,'' said Morelli, who is employed by the Allegheny Intermediate Unit but worked intensively with a group of three fourth-graders at Osborne Elementary School.

Morelli saw their fluency improve, their spelling become more accurate and their ability to write grow from struggling to put down two or three sentences to writing a page. The lessons were a preamble to the main event: a large-scale, $9.6 million study of 480 children to see what helps older elementary school pupils who have fallen seriously behind in reading.

Morelli and more than 40 other teachers in 50 schools in 23 school districts in Allegheny County are part of the Power4Kids Initiative, started by the Haan Foundation for Children of San Francisco, which is working in partnership with the Allegheny Intermediate Unit. Fourteen funders and eight organizations are involved in the study.

Joseph Torgensen, the principal investigator, a professor of psychology and education at Florida State University and director of the Florida Center for Reading Research, said this is the largest scientific intervention study with older children ever done. The teachers were randomly assigned one of four intensive reading intervention strategies and spent one week learning the assigned strategy. Then the teachers worked with small groups of fourth-graders for seven weeks to hone their skills. Early next month, the formal study will begin with third- and fifth-graders who were selected at random from the lowest performing readers in their schools. The pupils are so far behind that learning at an average pace isn't enough for them to catch up. They need something that will give a big boost. For many of these children, this is a make-or-break age for learning how to read.

The selected pupils will work in groups of three with a teacher using one of the strategies for one hour a day and a total of 100 hours. They will be tested before, after and a year later. The study will look at the impact of high quality intervention with "reasonable" time, intensity and teacher training and support. It will also see whether one strategy works better than another in general or with particular children.

Cinthia Haan, co-founder of the Haan Foundation, started this project when she had trouble finding help for her dyslexic son despite having time and money. She wants to see education research meet the same standards as medical research. Then, just as a doctor diagnoses and recommends a tested treatment, a teacher also could use the appropriate strategy for the pupil's problem.