Early Intervention Research Paper

Reading is a complex activity. It sends our brains into a frenzy of electrical impulses that zig and zag through matter in ways we still do not totally understand. It organizes sights and sounds in designs that ultimately connect us to the broad vistas of life's many landscapes. Reading gives us the opportunity to appreciate those landscapes in all their variety. It is remarkable that, whatever approach, method, or ideology is used to teach reading, most students become proficient at it.

For many students, successful reading is assimilated into their experience quickly and with seeming smoothness. For perhaps as many as 20% of students however, reading is not an automatic skill. Patterns of understanding have to be systematically instilled
In this paper, the term early intervention refers to early school intervention programs that are designed to prevent problems in literacy from developing rather than trying to correct a problem after it is established. For the most part, such programs have been used in first and second grades. Several of these programs have proven very effective when compared to conventional compensatory reading programs. For example, Hiebert, Colt, Catto, and Gury (1992) report that while 77 percent of the students in their early intervention project were reading at a primer level at the end of first grade, only 18 percent of a comparison group who participated in a traditional Title I program achieved that level of reading proficiency. While almost half (47 percent) of the students in the conventional Title I program remained nonreaders at the end of first grade, only 7 percent of the early intervention students were nonreaders. Thus, a growing body of evidence suggests that almost all reading problems are
Regular first and second grade classroom teachers work for an extra twenty minutes with the five or six students who are encountering the greatest amount of difficulty in learning to read. Provision is also made for these students to practice their reading for an additional five or ten minutes each day by reading individually or in pairs to the teacher, a teacher's aide, a volunteer, etc.
All five programs clearly acknowledge that the small-group or individual early intervention instruction that students receive is an addition to, not a substitute for, the instruction they receive as part of the regular classroom program.
In the case of two of the programs (Success for All and the Winston-Salem Project), regular classroom reading instruction has been redesigned to ensure that appropriate instructional routines and materials are used. However, even when early intervention instruction is added to an effective existing reading program, there is also the anticipation that the sound practices that are part of the early intervention program will become infused into regular classroom instruction if they are not already part of it. For example, Reading Recovery teachers almost always spend part of their day as regular classroom teachers, reading consultants, language arts coordinators, etc.; through these roles they attempt to introduce instructional