Background
Iversen and Tunmer conducted a study to determine whether the Reading Recovery program would be more effective if systematic instruction in phonological recording skills were incorporated into the program. Three matched groups of 32 at-risk readers were compared:

1. children taught by teachers who received Reading Recovery training
2. children taught by teachers who received Reading Recovery training that included phonological recording skills as part of the lesson
3. children who received a standard intervention (not Reading Recovery)

Measures included all six tasks of the Diagnostic Survey, Dolch Word Recognition Test, Yopp-Singer Phoneme Segmentation Test, Phoneme Deletion Test, and Pseudoword Decoding Task.

Findings
The critical finding in this study was that the two Reading Recovery groups preformed at very similar levels when Reading Recovery lessons were successfully completed (discontinued). Both groups performed much better on all measures than children in the standards intervention group, and they often performed significantly better than classroom controls (especially on phonological segmentation and phoneme deletion). Results revealed that the modified Reading Recovery group reached levels of performance required for discontinuing more quickly than the standard Reading Recovery group. Authors acknowledged that both the standard and modified Reading Recovery programs included explicit instruction in phonological awareness.

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This abstract first appeared in What Evidence Says About Reading Recovery (2002). Columbus, OH: Reading Recovery Council of North America.