Learning to read is the most significant academic achievement of early schooling and the foundational skill for all future scholastic endeavours. Yet 20% of students encounter great difficulty in learning to read and another 20% do not read well or quickly enough to enjoy reading, or to engage in independent reading. Such reading disparities among children are evident as early as Kindergarten, and those who exit grade 1 without adequate reading skills encounter difficulty with all aspects of the curriculum. Once this cycle of reading failure begins, it is extremely difficult to bring literacy skills to grade level and children typically continue to experience failure throughout their entire schooling.

Research has demonstrated that a preventive early intervention approach is effective in keeping children on track and ensuring that they learn to read well at an early age. However, despite recent research findings, the prevalent paradigm is a wait to fail approach: children at risk are maintained in the regular curricula until, by late second or early third grade, it is readily apparent that their literacy skills are far behind those of their peers and inadequate for them to successfully access the curriculum. Thus, they suffer years of failure and frustration, are then offered remediation that is really too little, too late, and require expensive support throughout their entire school careers. The cycle of failure continues with enormous costs—academically, socially, and fiscally—for both students and society.

The Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy, the New Brunswick Department of Education, and school districts across New Brunswick propose to stop the cycle of reading failure by designing and implementing a research-oriented, longitudinal, and sustainable preventive early intervention reading model. Our principal hypothesis is that the introduction of a continuous assessment system that yields growth trajectories for individual children will improve teachers’ classroom practice, particularly as it pertains to literacy development and remedial interventions, which in turn will lead to overall increases in literacy performance by the end of grade 2. Funding from this grant will support the piloting of a comprehensive reading development monitoring and assessment system designed by CRISP in partnership with 5 pilot districts and 22 selected schools, and the Department of Education, for implementation in September 2004. The practical and cost-effective monitoring and assessment system will: (a) diagnose the language knowledge of each child early in the Kindergarten year; (b) inform individualized instruction needs and teachers’ curriculum planning; (c) monitor children’s literacy growth trajectories; (d) compare literacy growth trajectories with a national, standardized benchmark; and (e) monitor the effectiveness of district-level literacy interventions and provide feedback to districts so they can strengthen their intervention strategies. Additionally, this research will implement a professional development program aimed at enhancing literacy development knowledge to help teachers prevent most reading difficulties through excellent literacy instruction for all children.

This study will investigate whether the monitoring and assessment system we are proposing can serve to strengthen and standardize the teaching, learning, and assessment cycle to help children succeed in learning to read. At the same time, this study is unique in its research design and reflects a strategic change in direction for site-based research. The program facilitates a large-scale action research study that strengthens the link between theory and practice, integrates both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, and includes a comprehensive and immediate knowledge transfer strategy. Assessment information is provided immediately to teachers so they can use the results to support their learners and advise districts on the effectiveness of their literacy interventions.

In summary, this research program will contribute significantly to educational research, policy and practice. Many jurisdictions do not have a standardized monitoring system at the school and individual levels. This research will implement such a monitoring system. Tracking students’ growth trajectories will inform our understanding of literacy development and enhance our knowledge of the variables that influence that development as children evolve from pre-emergent to fluent readers. Training will also help educators become expert literacy teachers who can set concise literacy attainment targets and knowledgeably detect, diagnose, and correct the disparate language needs of a wide range of learners.