Effective intervention to improve reading skills Children who fall below the expected reading level in the early years of their education often struggle to catch up. The UiT-ReadWell intervention has been designed to improve reading comprehension, now researchers are looking to assess its effectiveness through a multi-site randomised trial, as Professor Trude Nergård-Nilssen explains. A child who falls below the expected reading level in the early years of their schooling may struggle to catch up later on, which is likely to then hamper their education and limit their prospects. The early years of formal schooling are a correspondingly important time in addressing any issues, and the UiT-ReadWell intervention has been developed to try and improve skills in those children identified as poor readers by national tests in Norway. “The intervention has been digitized, with all sessions administered through a laptop or tablet. Voiceover instructions are incorporated to ensure a standardized delivery of the programme. The UiT-ReadWell intervention involves carefully structured 45-minute sessions, emphasising both decoding and language comprehension,” explains Trude Nergård-Nilssen, Professor of Educational Psychology at the Arctic University of Norway. As part of her research, Professor NergårdNilssen is now looking to assess the effectiveness of this intervention through a multi-site randomised trial on children between the ages of 7-9 in northern Norway, a region with a higher proportion of poor readers than the national average. “We invited children who fell below the expected standard to participate in the study. We
also assessed their language and reading skills to identify those who had performed below their usual standard in the test,” she outlines.
UiT-ReadWell intervention The majority of those children identified as poor readers by the national test were invited to participate in the study. The volunteering children were then randomly assigned to either the control group, which continued with the usual classroom instruction, or to the intervention group that underwent the UiT-ReadWell intervention four times a week. “The trial was conducted across multiple schools. This approach allowed us to gather data from a diverse range of settings, including different school sizes, geographic locations, socio-economic environments, and student demographics,” outlines Professor NergårdNilssen. The study was carefully controlled for specific variables, in order to reduce bias and ensure that the results of the two groups were directly comparable. “For example, there is a similar number of second language learners in the intervention and in the control group, while we also took the location of the school into account, as that is often a proxy for the parents’
education level,” says Professor NergårdNilssen. Children from more affluent areas may receive more support and encouragement from their parents for example, which may then influence their results, factors which Professor Nergård-Nilssen and her colleagues in the study have taken into account. “The two groups contain a similar number of children from each of the 25 schools involved in the study,” she continues. These children all performed relatively poorly in the national reading test, yet the underlying reasons behind their results could be very different. There are two main reading disorders – dyslexia and reading comprehension disorder – but it wasn’t clear to researchers at the outset of the study which children had these conditions. “We invited these children to participate on the basis that they performed poorly in the national reading test. We didn’t know if they had either of these disorders, both, or even none,” says Professor Nergård-Nilssen. Learning to read involves both decoding printed words and translating them into speech, as well as comprehending the meaning of that speech, skills which Professor Nergård-Nilssen says are interconnected. “Without decoding, comprehension
UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø Campus Photo credit: Stig Brøndbo
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