LCNA’s interventions are backed by rigorous research and have been documented as effective by both the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse and Evidence for the Every Student Succeeds Act.  

In addition to a sound foundation of research leading to its development, LCNA’s interventions have been evaluated for effects on:

• student outcomes across a wide variety of populations
• teacher learning and change
• the teaching-learning process
• factors related to literacy learning
• implementation factors that influence success

Scholarly inquiry and evaluations of LCNA’s interventions meet the definition of scientifically based research:

• The structure and design are consistent with a large body of substantial research on reading and writing that began in the 1960s and continues today.
• Research uses systematic, empirical methods to collect data annually on all children.
• Our interventions use systematic and simultaneous replication studies to document outcomes for all children served, adhering to standardized methods, instruments, and timelines across all schools, districts, sites, and states. Replication outcomes have been remarkably consistent.
• Research and evaluation is reported in numerous published peer-reviewed articles and research reviews offering support for various aspects of the intervention (Borman et al., 2019; Borman et al., 2020; D’Agostino, 2018; D’Agostino & Harmey, 2016; D’Agostino & Murphy, 2004; May et al., 2016; Pinnell et al., 1994; Schwartz, 2005; Sirinides et al., 2018).
• The International Data Evaluation Center (IDEC) collects and reports outcomes, accounting annually for all children served in the United States.
• Each child is assessed before entering the intervention, again upon leaving the intervention, and at the end of the school year. Each child leaves with a documented intervention outcome status.

Across the past 40+ plus years, data on more than 2.5 million children served in the United States have been collected, analyzed, and reported annually by IDEC. Read more

While there are a number of peer-reviewed research studies about the positive impact of our interventions, there are four primary evaluations/reviews conducted by external experts.

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), an investment of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education, again confirmed the effectiveness of Reading Recovery during a 10-year review of research studies.

The research arm of the U.S. Department of Education doubled down on the findings of its 2013 review, finding additional positive effects for students of the early literacy intervention. Among the data in the 2023 report, an IES release cited, “…moderate evidence that Reading Recovery® positively impacted student achievement in literacy immediately after the intervention. There is also promising evidence that the program positively impacted writing productivity and receptive communication immediately after the intervention and writing conventions 3 years after the intervention.”

Learn More about WWC Ratings of Reading Recovery:

Reading Recovery has been evaluated by Evidence for ESSA in four qualifying studies (many other studies did not qualify because they only reported outcomes for successful students, or used developer-made measures). In comparison to control groups, the average effect size across the four studies was +0.43 on measures such as ITBS, CAT, Woodcock, and Gates. These outcomes qualify Reading Recovery for the ESSA “Strong” category, and for the “Solid Outcomes” rating (at least two studies with effect sizes of at least +0.20).

Addressing Literacy Needs of Struggling Spanish-Speaking First Graders: First-Year Results From a National Randomized Controlled Trial of Descubriendo la Lectura

A multisite, multicohort, student-level randomized control trial of Descubriendo la Lectura (DLL) students revealed statistically significant effects on all outcomes evaluated (Borman et al., 2019; Borman et al., 2020).

“This study represents the first experimental impact analysis of the DLL Program. Similar to the sister English-language version of the program, Reading Recovery, DLL demonstrates strong impacts for the sampled students across many dimensions of literacy in reliable ways that are replicated from teacher to teacher…DLL appears to produce impressive impacts of a magnitude rarely seen for educational programs of any type (Borman et al., 2020, p. 2015).

With more than 40 years of data, our interventions comprise the world’s most widely studied early interventions. Scholars both inside and outside the LCNA community have summarized the studies to identify trends and suggest future directions for research.

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