Impact of Summer Reading Program Based on Lexiles (SRP) Study on Reading Comprehension of Economically Disadvantaged 4th Graders; Summer Reading Program Lexile Study

Because different studies used different combinations of parent/teacher components, it was unclear which of these would facilitate student summer reading and subsequent reading achievement, and which would not. Therefore, to begin to understand which components are beneficial, the program examined in the current study removed certain components of the intervention developed by Kim and colleagues (Kim 2006, Kim 2007, Kim and Guryan 2010, Kim and White 2008), particularly ones that involved cost and time allocated to parent or teacher training and teachers spending instructional time preparing students for summer reading. The current study investigated the effects of providing books to students, along with sending them reminder postcards during the summer, but without any other encouragement components or teacher instruction. If this streamlined approach was found to be effective, the study team reasoned that this would indicate that the intervention Kim studied could be implemented without imposing any burden on teachers and schools, such as the costs associated with teacher-training and guidance. This streamlined approach could also be replicated by charitable organizations and other groups independent of schools, who could manage the program and even provide the needed books, further reducing costs. This report presents estimates from a large-scale, multi-district RCT on the effectiveness of a summer reading program on improving student reading comprehension for economically disadvantaged grade 3 students reading below the 50th percentile nationally. This study focused on the summer between grades 3 and 4 for three reasons: (1) independent reading demands increase dramatically in grades 3 and 4 (Chall 1983; National Research Council 1998); (2) the grade 3 to grade 4 transition was not a focus of previous studies; and (3) Texas state assessment data are available for the first time for xi Executive Summary students beginning in grade 3, and those data were used to control for baseline differences in this study. Each student in the treatment group was sent a single shipment of eight books matched to his or her reading level and interest area during the first part of the summer (June/July 2009), followed by a reminder postcard each week for six weeks. Eight books were chosen because this was the number used in two of the summer reading programs shown to have statistically significant positive effects on reading comprehension for specific subgroups (Kim 2006) or for the entire sample (Kim and White 2008). Students and books were matched using the Lexile Framework® for Reading, a linguistic, theory-based method of matching reading level and books that was developed by MetaMetrics, Inc. (MetaMetrics, Inc. n.d.d), and student interest surveys. According to a 2001 report from a panel of reading experts working with the National Center for Education Statistics, the Lexile Framework has been found to have solid psychometric properties and has been validated across a wide range of populations (White and Clement 2001). Lexile measures are reported for both readers and texts using a common scale unit called a Lexile (L), which ranges from 0L for emerging readers and beginning texts to 1700L for advanced readers and texts. A book’s Lexile measure is calculated by parsing the entire text into slices of 125 words and using a proprietary regression equation to assign a reading difficulty value to each slice based on word frequency and sentence length. The results are combined across slices to obtain the overall Lexile measure for the book. To match students to books on interest area, students were asked to select areas of interest from a list of such topics as art, adventure, and mystery..

Study questions The study was designed to answer the following confirmatory research question: •For economically disadvantaged students reading below the 50th percentile nationally, does being sent eight free books in the first part of the summer (June/July 2009) matched to reading level and interest area, along with six reminder postcards, result in significantly better reading comprehension scores in the fall? and two exploratory research questions: •Did students in the summer reading program (treatment group) report reading more books over the summer than did students in the control group? •Did the summer reading program have differential effects on reading comprehension, depending on baseline reading proficiency?