Nothing is more important when children enter first grade than learning to read and write! Good classroom instruction is one of the first steps in helping children become readers and writers. Yet for some children good classroom instruction is not enough. Reading Recovery serves as an additional level of support for classroom instruction in first grade by providing more comprehensive assessments, individualized instruction, and immediate intervention. So what is Reading Recovery and how does it work to bring children into the average of the class?

Reading Recovery is a trademark intervention with standards and guidelines to ensure the integrity of the intervention and the high quality of expected results. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) engaged in a 4-year evaluation of Reading Recovery in an i3 scale-up grant (May et al., 2016). CPRE assessed program fidelity by analyzing consistency with the Standards and Guidelines of Reading Recovery in the United States. Their analysis revealed strong fidelity to the program model across all years of the study, supporting the validity of their impact findings.

Reading Recovery serves the lowest-achieving first graders—the students who are not catching on to the complex set of concepts that make reading and writing possible. Individual students receive a half-hour lesson each school day for 12 to 20 weeks with a specially trained Reading Recovery teacher. As soon as students can meet grade-level expectations and demonstrate that they can continue to work independently in the classroom, their lessons are discontinued, and new students begin individual instruction.

As an early intervention, Reading Recovery is best described using four essential components. Click on each component to learn more about it.