When less may be more: A 2-year longitudinal evaluation of a volunteer tutoring program requiring minimal training

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects on reading ach ievement of a low-cost, widely implemented volunteer reading program that h as been expanding rapidly throughout the state of Oregon. Eighty-four begin ning first grade students at risk of reading difficulties were randomly ass igned to experimental and comparison groups. Adult volunteers tutored stude nts in the experimental group in 30-minute sessions two times per week in f irst and second grade, At the end of grades 1 and 2, students were administ ered a number of standardized reading measures, including measures of indiv idual word reading, reading comprehension, word comprehension, and reading fluency. Analyses revealed that students in the experimental group made gre ater growth on a word identification measure than students in the compariso n condition; they also made more growth than a group of average-achieving s tudents who were from the same classrooms as the students in the experiment al and comparison groups. Students in the experimental group also scored hi gher than students in the comparison condition on measures of reading fluen cy and word comprehension at the end of second grade. Differences were not statistically significant on passage comprehension. Findings are discussed in the context of the reading achievement effects that other adult voluntee r reading programs have attained. Pie suggest that in establishing adult vo lunteer reading programs it is important to consider how to balance the int ensity of training reading volunteers to achieve measurable impact on readi ng achievement with real world realities of the volunteer tutoring experien ce and goals for the extensiveness of implementation.