Syntes: The effects of theoretically different instruction and student characteristics on the skills of struggling readers (2005)

Källa: https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.40.2.2 (Reading Research Quarterly 40(2), 148–182)

Verified content

• [full text] Six relatively high-performing schools in a large urban Texas district, two first-grade cohorts. Pupils at risk (screened at the end of kindergarten, then WJ-III Word Identification, text level and a one-minute reading sample) were randomly assigned within each school to enhanced classroom teaching plus Proactive Reading (n = 92), plus Responsive Reading (n = 92), or enhanced classroom teaching only (n = 114); 78, 83 and 91 were assessed at posttest. A typically achieving group (n = 101) served as a benchmark.
• [full text] Both interventions: groups of three, 40 minutes a day, five days a week, October to May, by six certified teachers (three per programme, each teaching in two schools so that school and teacher effects were not confounded), with 42 hours of training before the study.
• [full text] Proactive Reading: a detailed scope and sequence with fully specified daily lessons, decodable text, much practice of skills in isolation. Responsive Reading: no predetermined scope and sequence; teachers planned from observed needs; leveled books that were not decodable; about a quarter of each lesson on isolated skills, with 10–12 minutes of explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, letter–sound correspondences and sounding out; supported reading and writing of connected text.
• [full text] End of year (Table 5, W-score contrasts): Proactive above Responsive on WJ-III Word Attack (difference 6.88, SE 2.80, t = 2.45, p < .05); no significant Proactive–Responsive differences on Word Identification (3.23, SE 3.33), Passage Comprehension (−1.31, SE 2.40), Spelling, Reading Fluency or CRAB-R Comprehension (−0.46, SE 0.58). Only Proactive beat enhanced classroom teaching on Word Attack (11.00, SE 2.74); both beat it on Word Identification and Spelling; neither on Passage Comprehension, Reading Fluency or CRAB-R comprehension. Effect sizes against enhanced classroom teaching on Word Attack: Proactive 0.76, Responsive 0.28 (Table 6). Overall average effect sizes: Proactive .84, Responsive .78.
• [full text] The authors conclude the two interventions were "essentially equally effective", with the exception of word attack.

Limits

• [full text] One trial, first grade, English, intensive small-group extras on top of enhanced classroom teaching in high-performing schools; neither group reached the typically achieving pupils on most measures.
• [assessment] Responsive Reading taught phonics explicitly but without a planned order, so the trial tests the planned order (C12's "systematic"), not phonics versus no phonics; about 80 pupils per arm.
• [assessment] Bears on C12: a head-to-head kill-condition test that failed on the decoding prong (survived 2026-10-20); comprehension did not differ, which agrees with C12's existing comprehension bound.

Added 2026-10-20 by the project (nightly attack run). [abstract] = from the published abstract; [full text] = read in the full text; [assessment] = the project's own assessment.