HISTORY
Revolutions start small.
The Pilot Study
In 1969, Victoria Green took 45 students and in 3 weeks, with only 30 minutes a day, proved there was a better way to teach people how to read.
Here’s the full story..
Language Circle®/ Project Read® materials were first used in the fall of 1969 in the Bloomington Public Schools, Bloomington, Minnesota. Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, had a student population of 27,000 students in grades K-12. It was the third largest school district in the state of Minnesota. The general population consisted of primarily middle class, Caucasian families.
The school district was in the throes of declining reading test scores. The mean scores for most grades were within the 50th percentile. The school board, as well as parents and teachers, were very concerned about the trend. At the same time the students in learning disability (LD) programs were making good progress in a reading program which was an alternative to classroom basal reading instruction.
This alternative program taught the concepts and skills of language, presenting them in their dependent order and delivering them through multi-sensory strategies and materials.
A pilot study was designed to implement the alternative program into the regular classroom reading instruction for students who were in the low reading group and obviously “falling through” the basal program.
There were 45 students in low reading groups in the six classrooms designed for the pilot study in (School A). The study was designed to identify 45 students in another school (School B) comparable to School A. The 90 students were matched - paired on five variables:
- Grade placement
- Ability
- Reading achievement
- Sex
- Age
School psychologists administered the Wide Range Achievement Tests (Jastak) and Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests to all 90 students in the fall of 1969 prior to program implementation in the classrooms.
The pilot program then began in 6 primary classrooms. (Two classrooms each in grades 1, 2, and 3.) The control group, 45 students in School B, were to remain in the basal program which was MacMillian.
Tori Greene, then the LD special education teacher, began to implement the alternative reading program in the 6 classrooms through demonstration/model teaching. She began with grade 3 as they were the farthest behind in reading. For thirty minutes each day over three consecutive weeks she taught the low reading group in this alternative reading program while the classroom teacher observed. The other reading groups were doing their independent work during this time. At the end of three weeks the classroom teacher took over the instruction and Mrs. Greene went back every three or four days to teach a new unit or introduce a new strategy. Mrs. Greene then proceeded to train the second and first grade teachers repeating the process.
At the end of the 1969-1970 school year the experimental group had made 2 to 3 times the progress of the control group as measured by standardized tests.
Click here for more information on the Pilot Study.
In the spring of 1970 this data was presented to the Bloomington Board of Education. In view of the district’s declining test scores and this data, they mandated the alternative program district wide for children placed in low reading groups. The alternative program utilized Project Read® materials. The school board approved positions for ten demonstration/model teachers to replicate Mrs. Greene’s role. The Board designated Mrs. Greene the Director of the alternative program. The program was placed under the responsibility of the LD Department.
Ten teachers were selected from the district’s staff. They had to have taught successfully in a classroom for a minimum of two years, be able to communicate well with adults and children, and have a good “sense of humor”. Mrs. Greene trained the ten teachers in the use of Project Read® materials and after six weeks they began their work as demonstration/model teachers.
Each demonstration teacher was assigned two elementary buildings. The first year they worked with grades one through three. Each subsequent year they followed the original third graders through sixth grade. Thus after four years all the elementary teachers had been trained to teach with Project Read® materials in their classrooms to children who for a variety of reasons needed direct, systematic, multi-sensory instruction in reading.
At the beginning of implementing the program district wide, a major research study was designed to measure its results over a three year period. It was not possible to designate a control group as the board had mandated this program for all at-risk children. The control group was the baseline data at the time of entry into the program.
Nineteen behavioral objectives were drawn up to be measured by standardized tests. Thirteen hundred students in grades one through three were identified as at-risk based on these criteria:
- Student reading scores fell at or below the 25th percentile.
- Students ability was at or above 90 on the Otis Lennon Ability Scale.
- They were placed in the low reading group in their classroom.
Of the 1300 students identified, 600 were randomly selected to participate in the study. The remaining 700 were also using Project Read® materials but because of budgetary and staff restraints they could not be measured. All 1300 students were taken out of the basal program for the length of the study.
School psychologists administered the tests each fall from 1970-1973. Nineteen behavioral objectives were designed to measure progress over the three year period. The majority of the objectives targeted reducing the number of students falling below the 25th or 50th percentiles by, as an example, 25 or 50 percent. One of the objectives was to reduce the number of students referred for special education services.
At the end of this major study, 12 of the 19 behavioral objectives were met at a .001 level of significance. Referrals for special education services were reduced by 72% over the three year period.
Click here for more information on the Major Study.
Project Read® materials began as an intervention to be delivered in the regular classroom by the regular classroom teacher. Its curriculum was teaching the concepts and skills of phonology for decoding and encoding. The phonics was based on the Orton-Gillingham-Stillman method of phonics and Mrs. Greene created the unique strategies and materials to implement it in a classroom, group setting. During the first year of district wide implementation it was soon apparent that the majority of identifiable at-risk children had broader based language learning problems which would require a similar intervention in reading comprehension and written expression. Thus Mrs. Greene developed the rest of the curriculum based on the original three educational principles of:
1) direct instruction of the concepts and skills of language
2) presented in their dependent order from simplest to most complex
3) delivered through multi-sensory input reflected in strategies and materials created specifically for each concept and skill.
To this day Language Circle®/Project Read® materials provide a viable, effective intervention for anyone who is at-risk in learning to master the symbol system of their language, both in reading and written expression. Language Circle®/Project Read® materials have been utilized and results measured in schools
throughout the United States with similar and better results compared to the original data. Mrs. Greene continues to revise and update the curriculum. The sequence of concepts and skills match the state standards for language arts instruction in California, Louisiana, and Texas. Language Circle®/Project Read® material correlates very highly with the recent National Reading Panel recommendations for effective reading programs.
