Common Questions

All levels of LCNA Intervention professional development (Teachers, Teacher Leaders, and Trainers) are tied to university graduate-level credits. The quality and intensity of sessions over a full academic year merit recognition through university standards. An academic environment and university resources support the quality of the professional learning. Successful completion of course work is required for recognition as an LCNA Intervention Teacher, Teacher Leader, or Trainer.

If your district has one of our Interventions, but your school does not, you will want to talk with your principal about the possibility of bringing an LCNA Intervention to the school. This action requires that the principal and faculty members are knowledgeable about the intervention and support adding it to the comprehensive literacy plan for the school. If appropriate support and adequate resources are provided, the teacher(s) will be selected according to Standards and Guidelines for selection of teachers and local personnel procedures. If your district does not have an LCNA Intervention, but your school wants to study the possibilities, the first thing to consider is whether there is a nearby teacher training site that would make contractual arrangements for including your school in that site. With school support, the principal would contact the teacher leader in that site for specific information about possibilities for implementing an LCNA Intervention in the school.

Check out Getting Started for more information about how to locate a University Training Center/Regional Institute.

Teacher training is available only through registered University Training Centers and Training Sites. These sites are affiliated with school districts that have made the commitment to implement LCNA Interventions according to the Standards and Guidelines. If your school or district is part of a registered Training Site, teachers are selected according to local procedures for open positions. Teachers must meet LCNA Intervention standards for selection of teachers.

Learn more about Continuous Professional Development and our 3-tiered system for initial training.

Funding decisions are critical to the longevity of LCNA Interventions and for the success of children who need its support. The ongoing priority for LCNA administrators is to support the Intervention with a stable and long-term funding stream. In some districts that may be local funding, in other districts it will be federal, and still others will use a mix of federal, state, and local funding.

Temporary funding sources are best used for one-time or short-term needs. Among those could be special grants for professional development, capitol investments to build or remodel a training facility, or an investment in materials such as children’s books. While these targeted grants are important and useful, a long-term funding plan is the best way to ensure that LCNA Interventions will be available to children who will continue to need its highly trained teachers in the years to come.

A team approach in developing this long-term plan provides broad-based support. Involving stakeholders across the site is more likely to allow sustained funding during tough economic times or when conflicting priorities emerge.

• Creative funding. Many schools think creatively when searching for resources to implement an LCNA Intervention. Remember that flexible staffing ultimately represents dollars. See examples in “Implementing RTI and Staffing Reading Recovery in Difficult Economic Times”(PDF) from The Journal of Reading Recovery.
• State and local funding sources. Several states have appropriated early literacy funding in their state budgets, and a few states have created professional development funds to help pay for professional development. Check with your state department of education to see what funds may be available. In addition, several school districts have applied for grants from foundations or corporate-giving programs.
• Federal funding sources. Federal legislation is divided into major components called Titles. In each Title there are several Parts. Federal education programs are often referred to by the Title and Part that describes them. Formula grants are allocated to states or their subdivisions in accordance with distribution formulas prescribed by law or administrative regulation, for activities of a continuing nature not confined to a specific project. Formula entitlement grants are awarded to school districts and are not competitive in nature. This often makes them ideal for funding long-term projects in that they are not “up for competition” every few years. However, formula grants are not always assured. Legislative priorities can change and an entitlement can be discontinued.Several types of federal funds and considerations for sites in using these funds are included below.

• • Title 1, Part A. Improving Basic Programs. This program provides financial assistance through state educational agencies (SEAs) to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or percentages of poor children to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic content and student academic achievement standards.
  • Funds reserved under Title I for school improvement reserved under section 1003(a) - School Improvement Funds, also known as School Improvement Grants (SIG). Grants to states for Title I schools that do not make adequate yearly progress for at least 2 consecutive years. Authorized activities include the development and implementation of school improvement plans, professional development for teachers and staff, corrective actions such as instituting a new curriculum, development and implementation of restructuring plans, and the provision of public school choice and supplemental educational services options.
  • Title II, Part A - Teacher and Principal Training and Recruiting. The purpose of Title II, Part A is to help increase the academic achievement of all students by helping schools and school districts ensure that all teachers are highly qualified to teach.
  • Title III, Part A - English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement. Consolidates the 13 current bilingual and immigrant education programs into a state formula program and maintains the current focus on assisting school districts in teaching English to limited-English-proficient students.
  • IDEA 2004 Title I, Part B - Assistance for Education of All Children with Disabilities. Early intervening services and response to intervention. Discretionary use of up to 15% of formula grant special education funds to LEAs.

LCNA Interventions are available on a nonprofit, no royalty basis to schools and districts that agree to operate according to established standards and guidelines. The costs include professional development for teacher leaders and teachers, materials and supplies, and evaluation. Common areas to consider when budgeting for an LCNA Intervention include:

• Professional development. In the United States, LCNA Interventions are a three-tiered collaboration that includes universities, teacher training sites (often operated by school districts or a consortium of districts) and schools. Select universities in the U.S. oversee the professional development and implementation of an LCNA Intervention. School administrators who want to adopt an LCNA Intervention and provide professional development for their teachers will either establish their own teacher training site, or affiliate with a site nearby for teacher training.
• Teacher training. Teacher training sites must have one or more LCNA teacher leaders who have been trained for an academic year at a University Training Center in the United States. Sites will train a teacher leader or secure access to a trained teacher leader who provides initial training and ongoing professional development for LCNA teachers. Costs for training a teacher leader include tuition for graduate level course work during the training year and a university training fee that varies by university. The site must also equip a room with a one-way mirror and sound system to provide initial training and ongoing professional development for teachers. Teacher training costs are established by the training site and include university tuition for graduate course work, books, materials, and affiliation fees. In many cases, fees are also calculated to offset all or part of the salary for the teacher leader who oversees the site. Ongoing professional development costs vary by training site. Contact a nearby teacher training site or university training center for specific costs.
• Materials and supplies. Our Interventions require an extensive collection of short books (usually paperback) because children read a new book each day – one that has been carefully selected by the teacher to support expanded reading skills. Each teacher will need a set of starter books that will grow over the years. The initial purchase of non-consumable children’s books is about $2,500 per year. Books are not purchased through LCNA, but from other publishing houses that provide suitable titles for the use of LCNA Teachers during lessons. Other costs include professional books, materials, and supplies, a magnetic board, easel, magnetic letters, and erasable white board. A teacher leader or university trainer will supply a specific list of materials and costs.
• Data and evaluation. The International Data Evaluation Center (IDEC), an ongoing research project in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data. Each  site will pay two separate fees to the IDEC. The first fee is an annual site setup fee and covers the cost of annually updating a site’s rosters of teachers and schools, plus ongoing phone and email support from the IDEC Help Desk for teacher leaders. The second fee is a per teacher data entry fee. This fee covers the cost of data entry on the IDEC website and the production of annual reports and a data dump at the end of the school year.
• Staffing. School administrators have considerable flexibility in how they staff LCNA Interventions, and many schools are able to implement them by realigning existing staff. LCNA Teachers need to be able to teach four individual 30-minute lessons each day in addition to their other roles within the school. These teachers may be classroom teachers, Title I teachers, intervention specialists, teachers of MLL or special education, or literacy coaches and administrators. On average, the teachers working in LCNA Interventions use their expertise to support 8 students each year and an additional 40 students in other instructional roles. Since LCNA training and instruction is intense, administrators must ensure that teachers have adequate time and compensation for their work with the lowest-achieving first-grade children

One-to-one teaching may sound expensive, but LCNA Interventions are economical for several reasons.

• It is effective in both the short-term and long-term.
• It is a way to reduce costs associated with retention and long-term placements in special education, Title I, and other compensatory programs.
• It is a way to identify children who may need additional support through response to intervention.
• It is a way to build capacity in teacher expertise through professional development.

For more information about cost-effectiveness analysis and LCNA Interventions, see:

• Cost Effectiveness Analysis as a Decision Tool in Selecting and Implementing Instructional Interventions in Literacy
• The Long-Term Costs of Literacy Difficulties
• Making a Wonderful Life

Research and evaluation data reveal that our Interventions reduce achievement gaps in at least four areas:

• The gap between low and average achievers
  • IDEC Annual Evaluation Reports
• The gap between higher income and poverty status children
  • Investing in Equity Funding
  • Predicting the Literacy Achievement of Struggling Readers
• The gap among minority-status children
  • Predicting the Literacy Achievement of Struggling Readers
• The gap between English language learners and native English speakers
  • Addressing Literacy needs of Struggling Spanish-Speaking First Graders
  • Building Bridges of Talk: Supporting English Language Learners in reading Recovery
  • The Success of Reading Recovery for English Language Learners and Descubriendo La Lectura for Bilingual Students in California 

Our Intervention outcomes for multiple language learners are quite similar to those of native English speakers. Explore the English language learner intervention in Spanish and French.

LCNA Interventions are a compelling option for schools that are designing response to intervention (RTI) or multi-teared systems of support (MTSS) models to meet the needs of struggling readers and writers. Collaborative efforts among general educators, special educators, and LCNA professionals can lead to the development of  promising RTI/MTSS models.

The 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA; IDEA) encourages early intervention to determine if a child responds to the intervening instruction. The goal is to limit referrals by distinguishing between children who have learning disabilities and children whose difficulties are related to experience and instruction. This goal closely parallels LCNA’s goal “to dramatically reduce the number of learners who have extreme difficulty with literacy learning and the cost of these learners to educational systems” (Clay, 1994).

The Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement was reviewed and rated as a screening tool by the National Center for Response to Intervention (NCRTI) using a composite score for all six tasks. NCRTI assigned the highest possible rating – Convincing Evidence – in all categories: Classification Accuracy, Generalizability, Reliability, Validity, and Disaggregated Data for Diverse Populations. Read the article (PDF) from the Spring 2012 issue of The Journal of Reading Recovery “Technical Review Committee Confirms Highest NCRTI Ratings for Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement.”

Learn more about the Observation Survey

Since Reading Recovery began in the United States in 1984, student outcomes have been documented for every child served. The achievement of specific goals for each child is measured using An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (Clay, 2002, 2005, 2016).

Instrumento de Observación de los Logros de la Lecto-Escritura Initial (Escamilla et al., 1996) is used for assessment of Descubriendo la Lectura children. Le sondage d’observation en lecture-ecriture (Clay, 2003) is used for French Canadians learning to read and write in French.

In a recent update, the National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) reviewed the six tasks of the Observation Survey as a composite and found it showed classification accuracy in identifying at-risk students in the fall or winter of first grade based on a nationally representative sample. The assessment also demonstrated strong reliability and validity. This updated review again validates the use of the Observation Survey as a valid and reliable screening tool to be used to identify and intervene with the lowest literacy achievers in Grade 1.

Additionally, the Slosson Oral Reading Test-Revised (SORT-R3) is administered as pre- and post-tests as an additional measure with each student. Learn more about the SORT-R3 at https://www.slossonnews.com/SORT-R3.html.

Daily lessons for LCNA Intervention Students are essential. Missed lessons minimize the potential of the intervention outcome. For students who have difficulty remembering from day-to-day, the teacher can act as the memory of yesterday’s responses, and can prompt the child accordingly. An intensive intervention allows the teacher to closely attend to the daily shifts in the child’s responding. Clay tells us that the power of early intervention is diminished if the child is absent from lessons or if the teacher is unavailable to teach for any reason. “When daily individual teaching is not achieved, the quality of the teaching and the outcomes of the intervention will be seriously affected” (Clay, 2016, p. 21).

A series of LCNA Intervention Lessons is about 12 to 20 weeks. As soon as a student makes accelerated progress and achieves the intervention goal, the series of lessons ends. But every child has the opportunity for 20 weeks of individual lessons before a decision is made about the child’s status when ending the individual lessons. Research (Clay & Tuck, 1991) revealed that premature predictions about whether a child would achieve the intervention goal could be wrong for too many children and that it would be unwise to withdraw students too soon. Students, therefore, have the opportunity for 20 weeks of instruction if lessons are not discontinued earlier after achieving accelerated progress.

In industry, standards are developed to ensure that a high-quality product is implemented uniformly in order for the product to yield the same high-quality outcomes regardless of where it is produced. All countries involved in our Interventions have a set of implementation standards to protect the quality of the intervention in relation to teaching children, training and professional development for teachers, and system implementation.

See the Standards and Guidelines Webpage for specific expectations for implementation in the United States and Canada.

Effective LCNA Intervention implementation reforms and improves educational systems. The quality of implementation has significant effect on outcomes and on the degree to which the Intervention can affect the system.

In order to achieve the maximum benefits, school systems implement LCNA Interventions according to published standards for operation of the intervention. Highly effective implementations significantly reduce the number of children with severe reading problems.

Critical factors in implementation effectiveness

• Full implementation is achieved when district support is robust enough to ensure that every child who needs an LCNA Intervention service has access to the intervention. This is calculated by determining individual need at individual schools and should not be construed as a district average.
• Administrative support implementing a high-quality Intervention often requires changes in people’s beliefs, organizational patterns, allocation of resources, roles, and communication patterns. Administrators play a critical role in this process. They must plan for and ensure resources are committed to achieve full implementation. Close collaboration and communication among stakeholders and LCNA Interventions is an integral part of the educational system.
• Adherence to Standards and Guidelines is a cornerstone of effective implementations.

Sustaining LCNA Interventions in schools 
Once established, a strong commitment to sustaining LCNA Interventions ensures a strong implementation. LCNA’s role in the schoolwide literacy plan must be made clear. Data collected and reported annually can be used to evaluate program success, inform decisions, and for further planning for meeting the needs of children.

A strong commitment also involves sustaining teaching and training quality through professional development opportunities. Key LCNA personnel have the opportunity to participate regularly in professional development activities. Continuous learning ensures the sustained quality of an implementation.

The decision to implement an LCNA Intervention with fidelity is a collaborative partnership among teachers, administrators, parents, and university personnel. Strong coordination and communication among groups contributes to the success of any implementation.

The International Data Evaluation Center (IDEC) at The Ohio State University collects data on every child from every site in the United States on an annual basis. Each child is assessed before entering the Intervention, again upon leaving the Intervention, and at the end of the school year. Each child leaves the Intervention with a documented intervention status (outcome).

This evaluation system provides direct accountability for each child’s progress and provides a record of strengths and continuing needs for each child. IDEC evaluation also includes process data to guide intervention decisions. (See www.idecweb.us for information about evaluation and copies of national reports.)

In addition to IDEC evaluation, University Training Centers throughout the U.S. analyze and publish outcomes. Evaluation frequently includes qualitative data about stakeholders’ perspectives on the Interventions: parents, classroom teachers, administrators, and LCNA professionals.

Multiple criteria are considered before determining if a child is ready for the individual lessons to stop. Consideration is given to a child’s ability to:

• read increasingly more difficult texts at an instructional level, learning from his own efforts to solve problems as he reads;
• compose increasingly complex messages using resources to get to new words, monitoring and editing work, and knowing when and how to get help; and
• continue to learn in the classroom.

A series of  lessons has two positive outcomes depicted by three status categories:  One status category for students achieving accelerated progress and two alternative categories for those who do not demonstrate the intervention goals of accelerated progress and an effective literacy processing system.

First Positive Outcome

• Accelerated Progress: Achieved Intervention Goal. The child meets grade-level expectations and can make ongoing progress in literacy without needing extra help beyond the classroom program.

Second Positive Outcome

• Progressed: Monitoring and Support are Essential for Ongoing Literacy Progress. The child demonstrates substantial progress but does not reach grade-level expectations after 20 weeks of instruction. Continued instructional support is needed to ensure ongoing progress and strengthening of the literacy processing system under construction.
• Recommended: Additional Evaluation and Ongoing Intervention are Essential for Ongoing Progress.  The child has not made accelerated progress after 20 weeks of instruction.  Additional evaluation and planning by the school team are recommended, and further action is initiated to help the child develop a literacy processing system and make progress.

Individual one-to-one instruction is essential for acceleration. LCNA Interventions enable most of the children who are the lowest literacy achievers in their class to accelerate their progress in order to catch up with their peers. Individualized lessons are the most efficient—and often the only—way to give these lowest-achieving children the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Rather than use a commercially prescribed instructional program, highly trained Intervention Teachers assess, analyze, and design daily lessons that are specifically tailored to follow the child’s unique learning process. In each 30-minute lesson the child:

• Reads two or more familiar books,
• Rereads yesterday’s new book (with the teacher taking notes),
• Works with letter identification,
• Breaks words into parts,
• Composes and writes a story/message,
• Hears and records sounds in words,
• Reconstructs the cut-up story,
• Engages with the new book introduction, and
• Attempts to read the new book. (see Clay, 2016, p. 35)

The one-to-one instructional setting is not a new concept in education, yet it may be more important today than ever before for the number of first graders struggling with literacy learning. Consider the current emphasis on having all children reading and writing by third or fourth grade. The higher we set the expectations, the more efforts and resources we need to accommodate the diversity in learners. Timely short-term individual teaching for the lowest-achieving children in first grade is a critically important tool for achieving universal literacy by age 8 or 9.

One-to-one lessons allow the teacher to design the intervention to begin where the child is rather than where the curriculum is. From a practical perspective, each child who is having difficulty will differ from others in what is confusing, in knowledge gaps, and in ways of responding to print. A well-designed individual intervention tailored to each child’s needs offers a fast route to catching up and progressing with class peers.

Any grouping of these learners forces a compromise. Research on the value of group interventions for children with extreme reading difficulties is not convincing (Dorn & Allen, 1995; Harrison, 2002; Pinnell et al., 1994; Schwartz et al., 2012). Children with literacy difficulties have already demonstrated that group instruction in classrooms is not sufficient. First-grade teachers know that low achievers bring diverse needs to the learning process.

Individual teaching presents concerns about costs to administrators. Yet the cost of retention and the cost of remediation year after year can be significant. Although it may appear costly for a teacher to provide 30 minutes of one-to-one teaching for a child, the investment is a small price to pay for 30–50 hours of teaching time that changes the future for the most-vulnerable literacy learners at the beginning of their school years — and for their teachers, families, schools, systems, and communities.

LCNA Interventions require that we begin with the most-severe problems so as to reduce the number of learners with extreme difficulty in literacy learning (Lose & Konstantellou, 2005). Because these are the children least likely to respond to and benefit from classroom instruction, they are selected first (Clay, 1991). They are the children who will become increasingly confused and are most likely to need extra help; without that help they likely will remain a concern throughout their school years.

These children have the opportunity for a full intervention (up to 20 weeks if needed) before outcome decisions are made. For the children who do not reach average performance, LCNA Interventions serve as a pre-referral intervention for those who may need longer-term specialist help, also a positive outcome.

Outcomes cannot be predicted reliably at entry to the intervention. Selecting the lowest literacy achievers who are in a regular first-grade classroom for the first time and not being served by another supplemental literacy program ensures reliability of teacher judgment and takes care of values like children’s rights, fairness and equality, and social and linguistic inequalities (Clay, 2009a).

Evaluation reports in the United States have validated Clay’s decision to reach the lowest achievers in their classes. We learned that “all kinds of children with all kinds of difficulties can learn, and can reach average-band performance for their class in both reading and writing achievement” (Clay, 1991, p. 60) — defying previous expectations.

Any school or system not taking the lowest children is out of compliance with the Standards and Guidelines.

LCNA Interventions may be judged as highly effective if data show that the intervention is significantly reducing the numbers of children with severe reading problems, there is clear evidence of strong support for the intervention, and it/they are perceived as an integral part of the educational system.

Assessing the effectiveness of our Interventions is a complex issue for several reasons. Implementing any high-quality educational change is a slow process that involves changes in people’s beliefs and allegiances, organizational patterns, allocations of resources, roles, and communication patterns.

Therefore, any assessment of LCNA Intervention effectiveness:

• Must recognize the time required for change to occur. Teachers and schools will not easily realize the full potential of the intervention in the early years of implementation.
• Must be evidence-based, but the evidence may need to be understood in relation to incomplete or partial implementation and in relation to classroom practice.
• Must seek to understand how the system is supporting the implementation as well as how Intervention teaching is effective.

Numerous research and evaluation studies using widely accepted standardized measures and/or state assessment tests demonstrate that our Intervention students make continued progress after the intervention has ended.

A recent 2022 study from the United Kingdom indicates that students sustain gains through 16 years old!

Children may not complete the intervention lesson series for two reasons: they move before the intervention is completed or they enter too late in the school year to complete the intervention.

Our design calls for up to 20 weeks of instruction. Children who reach grade-level standards may not require the full 20 weeks. Removing a child  before 20 weeks for any other reason is rare (e.g., child returns to a kindergarten placement). Such decisions are made at the school level and written documentation is provided. The child’s data are always retained and included in evaluation reports.

Any school or system arbitrarily removing children from our Interventions is out of compliance with our Standards and Guidelines.

The myth that Marie Clay was the origin of the three-cueing system model is certainly false as the readings of Clay demonstrate and as Adams confirmed.  And, the myth that our Interventions do not teach phonics or phonemic awareness, because the visual system is somehow less important, is also false.  So why then are these stories so closely linked to LCNA?

Learn more about the myths of three-cueing.

Downloadable Resource: Reading Recovery Instruction in Phonics and Word Reading

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992).  It is an auditory task only.

Phonics is the linking of hearing and recording sounds with letters, groups of letters, and words in an alphabetic writing system.  Phonics instruction helps students decode (break down) words during reading and encode (build) words during writing.

Teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in LCNA Interventions is based upon the assessment of what the student already knows and builds systematically based on what is needed to read and write more difficult texts.

Daily lessons provide multiple opportunities to learn and strengthen phonology (PA) and phonemic awareness as well as orthography, which includes phonics.

In Reading a child learns:

• to use phonology and phonics to monitor reading accuracy and solve new words ‘on the run’ as they orally read multiple continuous texts daily.
• to use known words to decode and read words by analogy.

In Writing a child learns:

• to hear the sounds in words and notice the sequence of the sounds.
• to hear the sounds in words and represent them with letters or letter clusters.
• to use known words to write unknown words by analogy.
• to use common letter sequences, or spelling patterns
• to think about sounds in words by reassembling a daily cut-up sentence based upon what needs to be learned next.

Additionally, a child

• Uses magnetic letters to quickly and flexibly recognize letters and manipulate letters to learn how to take apart and build words as onset-rimes and syllables.
• Works with letters and related sounds (e.g., making personalized alphabet books to link sounds and letters).

Groups like the International Dyslexia Association and the Learning Disabilities Association of America share our interest in supporting the literacy learning of young children, though our methods differ. Because of the strong interest in how we better support students with Dyslexia and other learning processing issues, we have established a list of resources and research, including a study about the positive impact of LCNA Interventions on students with Dyslexia characteristics published as recently as 2022.

Learn more about Reading Recovery and Dyslexia, including specific research conducted on the intersection of these issues.

LCNA is not an independent business venture: It is a not-for-profit intervention that involves collaboration among schools, districts, and universities. In the United States, the name Reading Recovery and Literacy Lessons have been a trademark of The Ohio State University since December 1990, when action was taken to identify sites that meet the Standards and Guidelines. The purpose of the trademark is to protect the quality and integrity of the Intervention across multiple implementation sites. Use of the royalty-free trademark is granted annually to sites that meet quality standards.

Our Interventions are not designed to take the place of a comprehensive plan for literacy but to provide a safety net within a comprehensive literacy plan. Our Interventions build the capacity of the system to serve all children at the level needed for success. Comprehensive literacy plans for schools and systems must include high-quality classroom instruction, effective early safety nets such as one of our Interventions, and continued extra support for a few students.

All three components are necessary to help every student succeed. LCNA professionals have a long history of supporting comprehensive approaches to serve all children. Our teachers also work with children in classrooms and groups at least part of every teaching day, thus contributing broadly to the school program.

Many U.S. educators have discovered that our Interventions become a catalyst for identifying literacy needs and for making changes as needed. For example, classroom teachers often report changes in their own practices such as observing and assessing children, choosing appropriate texts, focusing on strengths, teaching to develop a network of strategic activity, and teaching with higher expectations.

Our Interventions do not necessarily increase mean (average) scores of the class. They do, however, increase the actual number of children who read within the average range of their grade cohort and decrease the number of children who need extra help. A child who successfully completes intervention lessons must be reading at grade-level standards (documented in national evaluation data that compares interventions students to a national random sample of students in the U.S.)

LCNA Interventions are not aligned with any specific classroom approach. For decades, educators and parents have debated the best approach for teaching children to read. Research demonstrates that children have individual learning strengths and that no single approach is best for all children.

No! LCNA Interventions are a Tier 2/3 intervention in the MTSS/RTI Framework. Our Interventions help low-achieving children make accelerated gains to reach average grade-level performance. To achieve this rapid learning, children have lessons that are individually designed and individually delivered. Individual rather than group learning is essential so that children waste no time with what they already know. LCNA Interventions, in combination with strong classroom instruction, give children the best chance for success.

LCNA Interventions are based on substantial research about how children learn to read and write. Their roots are in Marie Clay’s research in classrooms and clinics as well as intensive studies from other disciplines. The What Works Clearinghouse independent review of experimental research clearly establishes the effectiveness of LCNA Interventions based on scientific evidence.

Additional research supports the development and effectiveness of the Intervention.

• The Observation Survey used in the Intervention has a strong research base.
• Studies documenting the development of our Interventions are found in Boundless Horizons: Marie Clay’s search for the possible in children’s literacy(Watson & Askew, 2009).
• LCNA Interventions are subjected to ongoing evaluation through the collection of data on every child. (Also see Scientific Research Base and Assessment)