Rankhorn, B., England, G., Collins, S. M., Lockavitch, J. F., & Algozzine, B. (1998). Effects of failure free Reading Program on students with severe reading disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 31, 307-312.
 

Research Question: What are the effects of the failure free Reading Program on a group of students with learning disabilities?
 

Subjects: 39 elementary students from grades 3-5, randomly selected from the lowest-reading groups with boys representing 79% of the sample. Students had average IQ but were reading 2 or more years below grade placement.
 

Setting: Southwestern suburban school district, daily instruction for 30 minutes each day with trained teacher
 

Research and Methodology:

Results: The results indicated that all the students significantly improved in their reading ability and also decreased the discrepancy between their achievement and ability.
 

Discussion: One question that I have is particular to the program and the teacher training. Frequently studies get results when the teachers attend intensive training but we do not get results when the programs are widely implemented in the schools without training. I also wondered how long the training took place each day and what were the size of the groups. Would this be a program that the resource teacher could implement or the classroom teacher. The authors did discuss the limitations of the study. They addressed the lack of a control group. I think that this study indicates again that students with learning disabilities work best with a direct instruction approach to skills.
 
 
 

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© 1999 University of South Carolina Board of Trustees

URL:    http://www.ed.sc.edu/caw/bio.html
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Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education.

Last updated: Spring, 1999