Evidence-informed teaching strategies for improved literacy skills : National strategy for early literacy

Detailed direct and indirect implications for the construction of policy and for the development of programs of research that will help to meet these needs are drawn from this review of the research base at the end of the report. [...] Researchers interested in any form of intervention from reading programs through to the effects of a new headache pill are interested in exploring the effect of the presence or absence of their treatment on an outcome (e.g., number of headaches with and without the pill, literacy levels with and with the intervention). [...] Turning specifically to the word reading section of the report, a statistical meta-analysis identified some 52 reading intervention studies exploring the impact of phonological awareness on reading and 38 studies exploring the impact of phonics on reading accuracy. [...] In interpreting these critiques, it is the author’s opinion that it is important to note that in all of the cases described above effects originally reported by the NRP study remained significantly greater than zero with the use of more conservative statistical analyses, differentiated outcome measures etc., therefore, the debate is one of effect magnitude not of questioning the existence of basic [...] In practice, Burns notes, the program effectiveness described by the NRP report would move a child starting reading at the 5th to the 14th percentile, and a child at the 50th percentile to the 70th percentile in the long term following intervention.