The Effective Reading Intervention Academy (ERIA) supports schools in identifying struggling students and provides them with effective interventions to assist them in improving student reading skills. The purpose of this report is to examine the implementation of this program at 20 school sites in the state of California.
The initial phase of ERIA is based on the work of Dr. Anita Archer and takes a "best practices" approach to training school sites in how to develop an intensive reading intervention program for struggling elementary and middle school students. Each Academy training features research-based curricula and techniques that work school-wide in a variety of programs, including special education and for English learner students. Trainings also prepare participants to utilize a Response to Intervention (RtI) model, in which students are assessed, identified for placement in intervention programs, receive interventions, and are monitored through ongoing assessments.
CalSTAT began working with local education agencies in 2004-2005 to bring ERIA to classrooms. Antelope Valley SELPA and West Orange County Consortium were the first, with each hosting an ERIA training in which school site teams of teachers, administrators, and program specialists participated. Individual sites from the cohorts then received ongoing follow-up coaching. In 2005-2006, the Southern San Joaquin Valley hosted an ERIA training and also received follow-up implementation coaching for ten additional schools. The ERIA effort is clearly gathering momentum.
Twenty sites from the three trained cohorts continued to implement ERIA and receive ongoing coaching support during 2005-2006. Sites implementing ERIA were able to design a program that best addressed the specific needs of their students for improving decoding and fluency skills--critical for increasing reading proficiency. This resulted in considerable variation among sites in the assessment of students and the interventions used.
Of the 20 participating sites, 18 reported on student assessment and intervention scores in the areas of decoding and/or fluency. This report will examine only the pre- and post-assessment scores of "struggling students."
After the initial training, all sites select an onsite coach to keep the momentum going and to ensure fidelity. While many sites chose a reading specialist as their onsite coach, some have selected an administrator or a classroom teacher to fill this role. The efforts of the onsite coach are supported by an outside coach who works with each of the sites within the cohort. The outside coach provides professional assistance as the sites develop and implement the ERIA program. The approach of selecting onsite coaches and supporting them with experts in the field is a sustaining activity and is essential to successful adoption and implementation of this program.
One of the things that has made this different from other trainings or in-services that we have attended, is the follow-up. It has been very concrete, very teacher friendly, and something we can take back and get everyone excited about. - Focus Group
Sites implementing ERIA within the two participating cohorts are all at different stages of the systems change process. The changes in curriculum, scheduling, and staff teaming required to implement a pervasive interventions program can be significant and may necessitate several years of incremental change before the program is at the stage of full implementation. At the end of the 2005-2006 school year, the West Orange County Consortium and Antelope Valley SELPA cohort had been developing their program for one-and-a-half years and the Southern San Joaquin Valley cohort had been doing so for six months.
| Stage 1 Building Infrastructure |
Stage 2 Early Implementation |
Stage 3 Full Implementation |
|||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staff training and development | Classroom scheduling and curriculum development | Assessment of all students for intervention placement | School-wide implementation with fidelity | ||||||||
| Administrator and teacher buy-in | Initial assessment of student sample | Ongoing progress monitoring | Accelerated learning for all students, especially struggling students | ||||||||
| Site plan development | Placement of students into pilot intervention programs | Full implementation of interventions | Improved student scores on standardized tests | ||||||||
| Purchase of materials | Develop processes for data collection and management | Increase in staff knowledge and skills | |||||||||
| Curriculum development | |||||||||||
While all of the sites in the two participating cohorts have been developing and implementing, several are deeply engaged in the implementation of ERIA reading interventions and have progressed further into Stage 2 of the implementation process. These sites have reported slightly higher levels of student performance on assessment measures. This finding is encouraging and suggests that as sites continue to advance toward implementation with fidelity, student assessment scores have the potential to increase.
Vista View Middle School in Ocean View USD exemplifies a site that has progressed in development and implementation of ERIA and is achieving higher student outcomes. The student academic test scores and ERIA data for Vista View MS have been included in this report for analysis.
Vista View MS received their initial staff training in January 2005 and began piloting their program with a group of struggling students several months later. In the 2005-2006 school year, Vista View MS assessed their entire student population for placement into interventions.
| Total School Enrollment | 884 students |
| Minority Population | 73% |
| Free and Reduced Lunch Population | 45% |
| English Learner Population | 19% |
| Students with Disabilities Population | 10% |
| Year | API Growth Score |
|---|---|
| 2002-03 | 763 |
| 2003-04 | 755 |
| First Year of Implementation 2004-05 |
779 |
| Second Year of Implementation 2005-06 |
794 |
| Year | All Students | Students with Disabilities | English Learners |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02-03 | 42% | 5% | 25% |
| 03-04 | 39% | 3% | 17% |
| 04-05 | 49% | 26% | 8% |
| 05-06 | 53% | 19% | 20% |
Decoding assessments measure a students ability to translate letters-to-sounds-to-words effortlessly. The automaticity of word recognition is a skill necessary in the development of fluency and comprehension. The San Diego Quick Assessment was used by nine schools to monitor decoding skills. This instrument uses lists of words that are keyed to grade level; students are presented with these lists in a given order and are asked to read the words. Each list successfully completed indicates that the student can effectively decode at that grade level.
Students who are decoding more than one grade level behind their current grade are considered to be "struggling students." The goal of ERIA intervention is to help these students bring their decoding skills up to or above their grade level. For the purposes of this report, only students who were first assessed as struggling students were included for analysis.
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| More than one grade level ahead | 0 students, 0% |
19 students 6% |
| Grade level plus or minus one | 0 students, 0% |
84 students, 28% |
| More than one grade level behind | 305 students, 100% |
202 students, 66% |
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| More than one grade level ahead | 0 students, 0% |
20 students 5 % |
| Grade level plus or minus one | 0 students, 0% |
119 students, 32% |
| More than one grade level behind | 375 students, 100% |
236 students, 63% |
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| More than one grade level ahead | 0 students, 0% |
1 student |
| Grade level plus or minus one | 0 students, 0% |
25 students, 15% |
| More than one grade level behind | 161 students, 100% |
135 students, 84 % |
It has raised teacher awareness of the needs of specific reading skills that their curriculum does not include. . .We are working as a team to meet the needs of our students.
-- Alvina Charter Elementary School, Alvina ESDOur students are struggling readers. . .We saw overall improvement in all areas.
-- McLane High School, Fresno USDThis project was a reaffirmation of what our staff had been discussing. Participating teachers were given the flexibility in scheduling to implement the various components needed. This work resulted in intensified motivation to continue implementation of these programs, but with a desire to include other teachers throughout our school site.
-- Alta Vista Elementary School, Alta Vista ESD
Fluency assessments measure how many correct words a student can read from a passage in one minute. This "correct words per minute" (CWPM) value corresponds to a scale that assesses how students perform relative to their grade level. The CWPM percentile value range for each percentile bracket increases with each semester to reflect the expected student progress during the school year; therefore, movement into a higher percentile bracket represents not just an increase in CWPM, but an actual acceleration in learning. Fluency skills are an essential building block in the development of reading comprehension.
Students below the 50th percentile are considered to be "struggling students." The goal of ERIA is to support schools in identifying struggling students and providing them with effective interventions that assist them in moving them to a higher fluency percentile bracket over the course of the school year.
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| Above 50th Percentile | 0 students, 0% |
95 students, 13% |
| 25th to 50th Percentile | 243 students, 32% |
182 students, 24% |
| 10th to 25th Percentile | 171 students, 23% |
194 students, 26% |
| Below 10th Percentile | 340 students, 45% |
283 students, 37% |
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| Above 50th Percentile | 0 students, 0% |
142 students, 19% |
| 25th to 50th Percentile | 473 students, 29 % |
346 students, 21% |
| 10th to 25th Percentile | 432 students, 26 % |
509 students, 31 % |
| Below 10th Percentile | 743 students, 45% |
651 students, 39% |
| Pre | Post | |
|---|---|---|
| Above 50th Percentile | 0 students, 0% |
8 students, 2 % |
| 25th to 50th Percentile | 79 students, 22% |
59 students, 17 % |
| 10th to 25th Percentile | 103 students, 29% |
97 students, 27% |
| Below 10th Percentile | 178 students, 49% |
196 students, 54 % |
Students were able to verbalize their sense of improvement in reading. Students really liked The Six-Minute Solution - they liked the information in the passages, too. As reading got easier, students were more eager to participate in Accelerated Reader.
-- Peterson Elementary School, Huntington Beach City SDWe found that all students (intervention classes, regular education, honors, and even a few GATE students) were not meeting the expectations for fluency. Therefore, we implemented the Six-Minute Solution in all intervention classes and regular education classes.
-- Mesa View Middle School, Ocean View SDI like the model, it gives every site the freedom to individualize the program.
-- Focus Group
In January 2006, an independent project evaluator began working with CalSTAT to evaluate both the ERIA program and the coaching model that had been implemented by the West Orange County Consortium and the Southern San Joaquin Valley cohort. Evaluation methods included the following: conducting focus groups and electronic surveys of participating administrators, teachers, and coaches; interviewing the outside coaches about the scope of their work; observing several coaching sessions; attending a site's debrief session with the teachers, their administrator, and the coach; and meeting with a site's school principal and a district representative.
An outside expert coach worked with each cohort to help develop and implement the ERIA program at individual sites. This support was provided throughout the school year during each stage of the process: the initial student assessment process, interpretation of assessment findings, intervention program selection, and progress monitoring. Those who were interviewed and participated in the focus groups indicated that the outside coach provided accountability, expertise, a non-biased viewpoint, and problem-solving assistance. All participants of the focus groups and other evaluation efforts agreed that this was one component of the ERIA model that should not be eliminated as the program is scaled up.
All sites participating in the program selected onsite coaches to support and train teachers at their site in the implementation of the ERIA program. However, it was found that this component was not as consistently developed as other ERIA components and that there was a great deal of variation in who the onsite coach was and how that individual worked with the teachers. The most successful model selected a school literacy coach who worked closely with the outside coach and the administration to implement ERIA. In the most successful cases, the onsite coach also worked closely with the teachers by assisting with student assessment, procuring materials, training teachers on ERIA curricula, and observing and coaching teachers in the classroom.
Findings from this independent evaluation will be available soon on the CalSTAT website at www.calstat.org/SpecialReports.htm.
This ERIA report was developed by CalSTAT on behalf of the California Department of Education. CalSTAT is part of the California Institute on Human Services (CIHS), which is located at Sonoma State University. For more information about CalSTAT, visit our website at www.calstat.org.
Report contributors: Cheryl "Li" Walter, Ph.D.; Kelly Bucy, MPA; Alan Wood