This study focused on the impact of Reading Plus on student achievement as measured by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) English (ELA) assessment. Changes in the reading proficiency of students were measured in relation to the amount of Reading Plus reading practice the students engaged in during the course of the 2016-17 school year.

Study Design:

A quasi-experimental ex post facto methodology was used for this study. This design creates “treatment” and “comparison” groups ex post facto (after the fact) to approximate the random assignment of students that would occur in an experimental design study. Students who completed at least 80 Reading Plus lessons were matched with students who completed fewer than 20 Reading Plus lessons. Matching was based on student demographic characteristics and initial SBAC ELA performance to create “baseline equivalence” between the two groups. In this study, 408 students in grades 4-8 (94% economically disadvantaged) from a large suburban school district in Southern California were matched based on the described methodology.

Key Results:

Students who completed at least 80 Reading Plus lessons achieved nearly four times the SBAC ELA scale score gains in comparison to a group of demographically similar students who had minimal or no Reading Plus use (significant at p<.001). These scale score gains translated into larger percentages of Reading Plus students advancing to a higher SBAC ELA achievement level or maintaining their current achievement level.

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This report describes a follow-up analysis of an earlier study examining changes in the reading proficiency of middle school students (sixth, seventh, and eighth grade) following a six-month course of web-based silent reading practice using the Reading Plus program. For this follow-up, the students were divided into four groups closely matched on pre-training reading ability, but with differing amounts of program use during the school year.

Study Design:

Middle school students attending one of two schools in the southeast U.S. were evaluated in both the fall and spring of the 2013-2014 school year using the nationally normed Group Reading Assessment Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE). During the 24 weeks between these two assessments, students were scheduled to complete four reading practice lessons per week.

Drawing from all participants in the study, individuals with four different levels of program usage (<40, 41-70, 71-100, and >100 SeeReader lessons) were closely matched on the basis of their pre-training GRADE Total Test Standard Scores, and secondarily by their Comprehension and then Vocabulary scores, yielding four matched groups of 51 students each (group size was limited by the smaller number of students with low program use).

Key Results:

While students in the four use groups started the school year at a comparable level of reading proficiency, and all groups improved their reading proficiency over the school year, significantly larger increases in GRADE Total Test Standard Scores (TTSS) and Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE1) scores were measured in students with more program use (use group effect: TTSS, p = .01; NCE, p = .03). Further, students who completed at least 100 reading practice lessons (~30 hours) achieved reading proficiency gains nearly four times as large as those measured in students who completed 40 or fewer lessons (~7 hours).

The encouraging gains achieved by the 100-plus lesson group are especially noteworthy because they were achieved with an investment of a relatively small amount of instructional time (~30 hours).

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This research measured changes in the reading proficiency of middle school students (sixth, seventh, and eighth grade) following a six-month course of web-based silent reading practice using the Reading Plus program.

Study Design:

Students attending one of two middle schools in the southeast U.S. were evaluated in both the fall and spring of the 2013-2014 school year using the nationally normed Group Reading Assessment Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE). During the 24 weeks between these two assessments, students were scheduled to complete four reading practice lessons per week.

Key Results:

Pre- and post-treatment GRADE scores were obtained from 437 students who completed reading practice lessons. Most of these students scored below the national average on the GRADE, with only 11% scoring above the 50th percentile. The actual amount of reading practice completed ranged from 1-20 lessons (n = 33) to more than 100 lessons (n = 117).

Pre- post-differences in GRADE Total Test scores differed significantly in relation to the amount of reading practice a student completed. Overall, increased program use was associated with larger Total Test score gains; students who completed 20 or fewer lessons over the school year increased their GRADE Total Test standard scores (TTSS) by 1.42 points (or 2.0 NCE1 points), while those who completed 100 or more lessons increased their TTSS by an average of 5.44 points (or 7.8 NCE points) (TTSS: p < .01, effect size = 0.34; NCE p < .05).

In broad terms, this study found that students who completed at least 100 reading practice lessons (~30 hours) were able to achieve reading proficiency gains on a nationally-normed third-party measure of reading proficiency that were nearly four times as large as those measured in students who completed 20 or fewer lessons (~5 hours).

1 Normal Curve Equivalents are commonly referred to as NCEs. Many state and federal agencies use them as a reporting method for specialized programs such as Title 1. NCEs are based on percentiles but have been statistically converted to an equal-interval scale of measurement. Therefore, NCEs can be arithmetically manipulated, meaning they can be averaged. This makes them particularly helpful for reporting data. The range of NCEs is from 1 (corresponding to a percentile rank of 1.0) to a score of 99 (or 99th percentile rank) with a mean of 50.

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