Effects of On-Site Reading Clinical Tutoring on Children's Performance

______________ This research was conducted to study the effects of field-based clinical tutoring on struggling readers. Struggling readers from two grade levels, 3 and 5 were randomly divided into two groups. One group received individualized tutoring in reading for a semester from apprentice reading clinicians (graduate students in Reading Program) and the other group did not. There were 13 sessions of one hour each per week. The reading performance of students in the two groups was compared on the two available measures in the school, (1) letter grade and (2) STAR results (a computerized diagnostic reading assessment program). Observational and anecdotal data from teachers and parents of children participating in the program was received. Seventy-six percent of children improved their letter grade in reading from the beginning of the school year to the end of the year grade in reading compared with 35% of children in the non-tutored group. None of the children in the tutored group dropped a letter grade, however, 17.64% of children in the non-tutored group did drop a letter grade or more. On the STAR scores (see description of STAR under Reading Assessment findings above), the tutored group outperformed the non-tutored group. Fifty-six percent of the children in the tutored group showed improvement in scores from Fall 2001 to Spring 2002 compared with 50% children in the non-tutored group. ________________ Children who do not learn to read in the early grades have a hard time catching up in reading. Francis, et al, 1996, did a longitudinal study that showed, on average, children who were poor readers in Grade 3 did not “catch up” to their peers in their reading skills. Moreover, 70% of children who were poor readers in Grade 3 were poor readers in Grade 9. Children who don’t succeed in reading in early grades begin to fall in a downward spiral in other subject areas as well as they climb the ladder of grade levels in school. Thus, early intervention is critical to alleviate later literacy related problems among children in schools. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effectiveness of on-site clinical tutoring intervention among at-risk children receiving the tutoring services from Graduate Reading Interns by measuring growth in their reading skills at the end of one semester. It was hypothesized that children who received tutoring from Graduate Reading Interns (experimental group) would show greater growth over one semester of individualized