Reading Interventions That Are Evidence-Based (And What Isn’t)
By: Becca Phillips, Advocate
Reading is a foundational skill that is centered at the core of academic success, and yet we see too often that even with the best intentions in mind, schools may still be relying on outdated or unproven methods and interventions that don’t actually help struggling readers. The difference between an evidence-based reading intervention and a well-intentioned, yet ineffective strategy, can make or break a child’s reading progress.
We need to be asking - what should schools be doing to support our struggling readers to make growth? The good news is that we now know what works and what doesn’t, thanks to years of research and the Science of Reading.
What Evidence-Based Reading Interventions Should Include
The strongest reading interventions are grounded in decades of cognitive science and the “Science of Reading” research. When schools implement reading interventions, the focus should always be on explicit, systematic, and data-driven instruction. This instruction must target the specific skill deficits a student is exhibiting that have been identified through assessment.
These interventions need to explicitly address the following five essential components of reading:
Phonemic Awareness – Helping students recognize and manipulate sounds in words. This includes skills such as identifying, isolating, blending, segmenting, and manipulating individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
Phonics – Connecting spoken sounds to letters, as well as learning how to blend sounds to read and spell words. Phonics skills range from basic alphabet knowledge and letter-sound correspondences to more complex concepts like blends, digraphs, syllables, and irregular spellings. Mastering phonics skills aids students in developing their fluency and comprehension skills.
Fluency – Reading fluency is a child's ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency is centered around the core skills of: accuracy, rate, and prosody (expression) to build automaticity.
Vocabulary – Direct teaching of vocabulary words in order to understand the meaning of words that children encountered in print. Developing vocabulary is crucial to building reading comprehension.
Comprehension – Reading comprehension is a child’s ability to understand what they are reading. Comprehension relies heavily on a multitude of other reading skills such as: decoding, fluency, and vocabulary knowledge. Comprehension includes skills such as: inferencing, summarizing, making predictions or connections, questioning, identifying main ideas, visualizing, determining themes, and sequencing.
Below are some examples of evidence-based programs and reading interventions that work because not only are they systematic in that skills are logically built upon one another, but they are explicit, and data driven. There should be continual and ongoing progress monitoring to guide and inform teachers on how to adapt instruction.
Orton-Gillingham–based approaches (e.g., Wilson, Barton, Sonday): Structured, multisensory, explicit, and sequential approach to instruction for decoding and encoding.
Read Naturally or similar repeated reading and modeling programs for fluency.
Lexia Core5 or PowerUp: Should be implemented in conjunction with teacher-led instruction and progress monitoring. This should not be a stand-alone program.
Heggerty or University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI): Programs for phonemic awareness and phonics mastery.
Language Comprehension: Using various texts to explicitly teach vocabulary, syntax, and inferencing strategies.
Common, Yet Ineffective Interventions
If your child is struggling to read, you’ve probably heard about different programs or interventions at school that may include guided reading, leveled books, “sight words,” and more.
Unfortunately, many schools are still using reading interventions and programs that sound supportive in theory, but do not align with reading science and what research actually supports. In fact, research has shown that some popular reading approaches can make it harder for struggling readers to catch up.
Leveled Readers. Level readers are often paired with guided reading and are designed to match perceived reading levels but they do not systematically build upon basic reading skills. Struggling readers who are constantly exposed to leveled readers may begin to memorize predictable patterns but they are not learning to decode unfamiliar words, thus making them ineffective. Decodable texts are a significantly better alternative that allow students to practice reading with specific phonics skills they have been explicitly taught.
Balanced Literacy Approach. This approach encourages children to use a “three cueing system”: to guess words from context, pictures, or first letters that undermines orthographic mapping and decoding skills. This strategy often leads to errors being overlooked and can be particularly problematic for students with learning disabilities.
Whole Word or Sight Word Memorization. Some reading programs are designed for students to memorize hundreds of sight words by sight, rather than teaching students how to orthographically map them, which allows students to link letters to sounds within their memory. Teaching sight words is an important part of early literacy skills, but memorizing them is ineffective. Instead, teach these irregular high frequency words by analyzing regular and irregular parts through phonics knowledge.
Silent Sustained Reading or “Drop Everything and Read” (DEAR). While we want children to have the desire to read and encouraging reading for pleasure is wonderful, SSR or DEAR approaches to reading do not build decoding, fluency, or comprehension for struggling readers who are not currently reading independently. A better alternative is guided oral reading with immediate feedback, repeated reading, or scaffolded fluency interventions.
All of this to Say…
If your school is still leaning on leveled readers, cueing systems, or “guessing” strategies to demonstrate student reading growth, it’s not about blame…it’s about growth and education. The Science of Reading gives us the tools to make sure every single child learns to read through evidence-based, structured literacy practices.
Evidence-based reading interventions should explicitly teach the components of the reading rope: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, all of which should be delivered through structured, data-informed instruction. When schools align their interventions to this research foundation, students make faster, more measurable progress.
If your child’s school is using programs mentioned previously that rely on guessing, leveled readers, or memorizing whole words, it doesn’t mean their teachers don’t care. Oftentimes they are using the tools that their school is providing to them and what they have previously received training to use. If you have a child that struggles to read, ask your school if your child’s intervention follows the Science of Reading or Structured Literacy approach. Schools must move beyond what feels comfortable or familiar and commit to what actually works!
