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Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR)

ISSN: 1082-4669 (Print) 1532-7671 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hjsp20

Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies (RAILS):An Integrated Approach to Early Reading

Robert J. Stevens , Peggy N. Van Meter , Joanna Garner , NicholasWarcholak , Cindy Bochna & Tracey Hall

To cite this article: Robert J. Stevens , Peggy N. Van Meter , Joanna Garner , NicholasWarcholak , Cindy Bochna & Tracey Hall (2008) Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies(RAILS): An Integrated Approach to Early Reading, Journal of Education for Students Placed atRisk (JESPAR), 13:4, 357-380, DOI: 10.1080/10824660802427611

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10824660802427611

Published online: 04 Nov 2008.

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Reading and Integrated LiteracyStrategies (RAILS): An Integrated

Approach to Early Reading

Robert J. Stevens, Peggy N. Van Meter, Joanna Garner,and Nicholas Warcholak

Department of Educational Psychology, School Psychology, and SpecialEducation, The Pennsylvania State University

Cindy BochnaResearch and Evaluation

Mesa Public Schools, Mesa, AZ

Tracey HallCenter for Applied Special Technology

Wakefield, MA

The goal of this project was to develop and test the efficacy of a research-basedearly reading program that provided integrated reading instruction in kindergar-ten through 2nd grade. The Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies (RAILS)program provided integrated instruction in word reading, vocabulary develop-ment, and comprehension to students in regular and self-contained special edu-cation classes in 2 schools serving low-income populations. Teachers providedexplicit instruction in the alphabetic principle, phonemic analysis, word reading,vocabulary development, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension.Classes were organized so students received 2 periods of reading instruction daily,a longer morning period of instruction and a shorter afternoon review of instruc-tion. The students in the RAILS program had significantly higher performance onstandardized reading and language achievement tests, as well as on individuallyadministered tests of phonemic awareness and reading fluency. The implications

Requests for reprints should be sent to: Robert J. Stevens, 202 CEDAR Building, Penn State

University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: rjs15@psu.edu

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 13:357–380, 2008

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1082-4669 print/1532-7671 online

DOI: 10.1080/10824660802427611

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for research-based instructional practice that integrates instruction in wordreading, vocabulary, and comprehension are discussed.

One of the greatest challenges facing educators today is the design of effectiveinstruction for children at risk of reading failure, or those already strugglingwith learning to read. In recent years, there has been general agreement thatthese children will benefit from neither whole language nor phonics instruc-tion alone, but rather instruction that is balanced. Furthermore, within thisbalanced structure, instruction should be explicit, intensive, and planful(O’Connor, 2000; Zigmond, 1997). In this article, we report on an effort tofollow these recommendations and design an effective reading program forchildren at risk of reading failure. This program, labeled Reading and Inte-grated Literacy Strategies (RAILS), was implemented in both general andspecial education classrooms in kindergarten through second grade.

Similar to other views of effective reading instruction (e.g., Cunningham &Hall, 1998; Stahl, 1998b), when developing the RAILS program, we wereconcerned about the components of the instructional program that mustbe present to achieve balance across the curriculum. In addition, at the urg-ing of several reading educators (e.g., Pearson, Raphael, Benson, & Madda,2007; Reutzel, 2007), we were concerned with how these components couldbe blended to support instruction that would be ‘‘more than the sum of itsparts’’ (Pressley, 2006, p. 1). As a result, a unique contribution of the RAILSprogram is the attention paid to integration across curricular strands as aguiding principle for instructional design. This principle was used to alignlessons so that children could readily perceive the connections acrosscomponents of reading skills.

In the following pages, we report on an evaluation of RAILS and use thisevaluation to show a program of reading instruction that is explicitlyconcerned with both component balance and integration. We begin thisdiscussion by providing the context for RAILS and giving an overview ofthe program. This section is followed by a review of the reading and readingeducation literature that most directly influenced the design of the RAILSprogram, as well as a more complete description of the program itself.

CONTEXT AND OVERVIEW

Development of RAILS began when a team of university researchers werecontacted by Special Education administrators from a local school districtwho were seeking help with their reading program. The presenting problemwas a common one: Although good readers in their schools were success-fully developing their reading abilities, struggling readers were falling

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behind. A series of discussions and visits to classrooms resulted in severaldeterminations for the design of a new reading program. First, a newreading program needed to include methods of explicit instruction thatwould support learners’ acquisition of specific reading skills (Foorman,Francis, Fletchers, Schatschnieder, & Mehta, 1998). Second, we needed todevelop supplemental materials and lessons to support this instruction.Third, the current reading materials needed to be reorganized to supportinstruction that was more planful, systematic, and connected. Fourth, theteam agreed that teachers needed an instructional program that wassequenced to allow for organized and flexible application across classroomsand age groups. And, finally, teachers could retain many of the literacyactivities already in use in classrooms, but needed to refocus these to providepractice and emphasize skills covered during explicit instruction.

The end result, as is detailed in forthcoming sections, was the develop-ment of the RAILS program. Designed for implementation in kindergartenthrough second grade, in both general and special education classrooms,this program focused on instruction in word reading, vocabulary develop-ment, comprehension, and fluency. The new curriculum materials were writ-ten so that, for any given day, the classroom teacher could access newlywritten phonics and vocabulary lessons and an index to indicate which basalor authentic text should accompany those lessons. In addition, scripts wereprovided to support delivery of instruction as teachers learned the explicitinstruction methods. The design of these lessons, the specific reading abili-ties that were addressed, and the connections across these were informedby the literature on effective reading instruction.

PRINCIPLES OF AN EFFECTIVE READING PROGRAM

In the literature on reading instruction, there is consensus that effectiveinstructional programs are balanced (e.g., Pressley, Rankin, & Yokoi,1996; Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, & Hampston, 2006; Reutzel, 1998).In attempting to understand what balance is, however, researchers haveoffered several different points of view (Van Meter, Stevens, & Garner,2002). Stahl (1998a) for example, has argued that reading instruction shouldpursue the three goals of accurate and automatic word reading, text compre-hension, and an appreciation of and love for reading. In this conception,balance must be achieved not within a lesson or even a day but rather overtime as children’s developing skills lead to changes in instructional needs.

Fitzgerald (1999) offered a description of balance that is focused on thephilosophy that underlies the desire for a balanced reading curriculum.She argued that balance must be understood as a set of beliefs rather than

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as a set of specific practices. Among these is the belief that, to acquire con-ventional literacy skills, children must acquire varied and equally importanttypes of knowledge. Similar to Stahl’s (1998a) list of goals, this knowledgeincludes the phonological knowledge necessary for word reading, compre-hension knowledge needed to understand text, and a ‘‘love of reading’’(Fitzgerald, 1999, p. 103).

Pearson and colleagues (e.g., Pearson & Raphael, 2003; Pearson et al.,2007) described balance as a series of independent elements (e.g., teacher’srole, skill contextualization, etc.), each of which varies along context andcontent continua from one extreme end to the other (e.g., maximum control,minimum control, etc.). According to this perspective, balance is achievedthrough flexible coordination of these elements. Pearson et al. (2007)emphasized that balance cannot be achieved by thinking in terms of singledimensions of reading instruction. Rather, balance can only result throughan understanding that effective instruction is multidimensional.

As these three examples illustrate, there are differences in how respectiveauthors understand and describe balanced instruction. Despite these differ-ences, there is also convergence around critical aspects of what defines thisinstruction. First, balanced reading programs provide instruction thattargets a number of specific reading abilities (Reutzel, 1998; Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, & Hampston, 1998). Common among these is instruc-tion aimed at teaching developmentally appropriate word reading skills(e.g., rhyming, segmentation, etc.), promoting vocabulary growth, teachingtext comprehension, and building fluency. Second, teachers who usebalanced programs employ different methods of instruction. Of particularimportance for struggling readers and children at risk for reading failure,these methods include explicit instruction in critical reading skills such assounding out words and using comprehension strategies.

Taken together, these descriptions indicate that balanced literacy pro-grams provide instruction on a variety of reading abilities using a varietyof teaching methods. What these descriptions do not inform, however, isprecisely how these varieties can be combined so that the program is notonly balanced, but also coherent across components. This missing elementis particularly troublesome, given the warnings of several reading educatorsthat, in striving to achieve balance, one must be careful not to create acurriculum that is a hodgepodge of instructional activities (Pressley, 2006;Reutzel, 1998). As Stahl (1998b) so eloquently phrased it, one must becareful not to create ‘‘Frankenclasses’’ (p. 32).

In the RAILS program, we addressed this need by paying particularattention to how instruction was integrated throughout the day and acrossprogram components. In the section that follows, we describe the RAILSprogram in more detail. Included are explanations of the structural changes

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made to classrooms, the curricular strands of the RAILS program, thecycle of instruction, and a description of some extension activities thatcomplimented direct instruction lessons. Also included in this programdescription is a section detailing what we mean by integration, why it isimportant, and how this need was addressed in the RAILS program.

READING AND INTEGRATED LITERACY STRATEGIES (RAILS)

Structural Change

Recent research has shown that allocating more time for reading instruction isparticularly effective for students in low-achieving schools or schools that servea high percentage of disadvantaged families (Pinnell, DeFord, & Lyons, 1988;Slavin, 1999). Commensurate with those recommendations, the instructionalday in RAILS classrooms was reconfigured to include two reading periods.There was a typical reading period of 60 to 90 min in the morning and a second,shorter reading period in the afternoon of approximately 20 min. Teachersprovided initial instruction and practice on decoding, vocabulary, fluency,and comprehension, as described in the following, during the morning readingtime. These lessons were primarily done in whole-class settings.

During afternoon reading periods, teachers provided additional practiceon the skills and activities taught in the morning. Typically, this involvedreview and practice of new decoding skills and vocabulary words. Unlikeprevious research that used afternoon reading periods for tutoring (e.g.,Madden, Slavin, Karweit, Dolan, & Wasik, 1993; Pinnell et al., 1988), theRAILS program provided all students with additional literacy practice inthe afternoon. This was seen as a logistically simpler way to address the needof this at-risk population for additional practice to help them retain whatthey had been taught that day.

Curricular Strands

There were four curricular strands in the RAILS program; these addressedthe specific reading abilities of word reading, vocabulary, comprehension,and fluency. The emphasis across these strands changed from kindergartenthrough second grade as a response to the developing skills and changinginstructional needs of the students. Within the word reading strand, forexample, lessons included explicit instruction on phonemic awareness skillssuch as segmenting and blending. For more advanced students, however,instruction in this strand emphasized decoding skills. Additionally, withinthe comprehension strand, as children began reading meaningful stories,

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teachers eliminated the listening comprehension component, spending moretime on comprehension during students’ independent story reading.

Word reading. To read words, children must be able to break the ortho-graphic code (Adams, 1990; Goswami, 2000). To do so, they must be aware ofthe sound structure of words and the correspondence between visual letters andphonemic sounds. In addition, as word and phonemic knowledge increases,children must learn strategies for sounding out and decoding words. In theRAILS program, the word reading strand was taught through direct instruc-tion on the alphabetic principle and phonemic analysis and word reading.

Alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle, an understanding that let-ters correspond to sounds in words, is an important prerequisite skill on whichphonemic analysis builds (Adams, 1990; Ehri, 1991). Although many childrenbegin kindergarten with a firm understanding of the alphabetic principle,those at risk of reading failure may lack this foundational knowledge andare in need of explicit instruction to build this important skill area (Ehri &McCormick, 1998). In the RAILS program, instruction in kindergarten class-rooms began with lessons to build this knowledge. In these lessons, childrenwere shown a visual symbol for each letter and taught the most frequentphonetic sound corresponding to the letter. Initial lessons focused on highfrequency letters so that students could begin applying what they learned inphonemic analysis and word reading activities. As knowledge of individual let-ters built over time, these lessons began to include common blends such as th-.

Lessons included explicit instruction in which the teacher presented theletter and modeled the sound. Children then practiced this associationthrough choral and individual responses. Practice at discriminating thevisual symbol was given by showing children a chart that contained manysymbols, some of which were the target letter. As the teacher pointed to eachsymbol, children indicated if that symbol was the correct letter for the targetphoneme. Individual letters were repeated on multiple days until childrenhad mastered the sound–symbol relationship. In subsequent days, teachersreviewed previously taught letters to allow for additional practice.

Phonemic analysis and word reading. In addition to mastering the let-ters of the alphabet, children also benefit from explicit instruction in thephonemic analysis skills needed to read words (National Reading Panel,2000). This is particularly true for struggling readers (Chard, Simmons, &Kame’enui, 1998). In the RAILS program, students were explicitly taughtand practiced phonemic analysis skills such as segmenting and blending.As students mastered sound–symbol relations, the lessons contextualizedthe skills in simple word reading activities. From simple words, the lessons

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proceeded to reading simple stories with controlled vocabulary. Thephonemic analysis instruction was a primary component in kindergartenand first-grade instruction. Like the instruction on individual letters, theselessons included teacher modeling and guided practice with review opportu-nities following on subsequent days. By second grade, students had mas-tered most of the necessary phonemic analysis and word attack skills andthe instruction shifted to more emphasis on reading fluency.

COMPREHENSION

Clearly, the ability to comprehend connected texts is a critical part of skilledreading. In developing comprehension skills, children learn that the storiesthey read have a predictable structure and that knowledge of this structurecan be applied to aid comprehension (Brown, 1981; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996).Importantly, it is also in the context of experiencing connected texts that chil-dren have the opportunity to see the purpose of their reading skills. Althoughmany children experience rich, connected texts in the home environment,many struggling and at-risk readers come from families in which there is littlereading or discussion of connected text (e.g., Yaden, Rowe, & MacGillivray,2000). In the RAILS program, experience with text was emphasized and usedas the context in which children learned about comprehension processes.This strand of the program began with listening comprehension in kindergar-ten classrooms and moved to reading comprehension by second grade.

Every kindergarten, first grade, and special education RAILS classroomwas provided with a set of authentic children’s storybooks. These tradebooks were selected to support instruction in both the (listening) compre-hension and vocabulary strands. The characteristics of these stories andhow they were used are described in the following sections.

Listening comprehension. Daily, during kindergarten and first grade,the teacher read children’s literature (trade books) aloud to the students.In the context of these readings, teachers provided explicit instruction onthe elements of narrative story structure and modeled the use of this structureknowledge in story comprehension. By teaching children about story struc-ture in the absence of attentional demands to decode words and deciphersyntax, it was believed that children would be able to allocate resources tothe application of the structure strategy and story comprehension.

In this strand of the program, teachers explicitly taught the elements ofnarrative structure. These elements were character, main character, setting,problem, and solution. The teachers taught the element by explicitly defin-ing the element and how students could identify it in a story. During initial

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lessons, teachers read short, contrived texts in which the target element wassalient. Teachers used these texts to model how to identify the element incontext. Students were also given guided practice on additional contrivedtexts. After an element had been introduced, subsequent lessons includedreviews of the defining features. Each day, the teacher followed the lessonswith orally reading children’s stories and discussing the story element in thecontext of the story.

The project staff selected specific storybooks and sequenced them tocompliment instruction on structure elements. Each day, the teacher reada story in which the target element (e.g., main character) was salient andprovided a good opportunity for students to practice identifying theelement. The teacher also embedded reviews of previously learned storyelements in the discussion of the story. The goal of the instruction was alsoto develop generalizable comprehension skills that would aid the childrenwhen they began reading stories themselves.

Reading comprehension. In the latter part of first grade and earlysecond grade, the program emphasis shifted away from listening compre-hension and increased student’s practice reading independently, focusingon reading comprehension as the students began reading stories on theirown. In these reading comprehension lessons, the emphasis was placed onchildren’s application of comprehension processes in the context of reading.These lessons were structured by questions that students would discuss andanswer with a partner. (See sections related to fluency, following, for a moreextensive explanation of partner reading.) The questions focused on bothelements of the narrative structure and meaningful parts of the story. Afterchildren had read a story with their partner, they read and discussed ques-tions about what they had read. As the stories became longer and moresophisticated, the students stopped halfway through the story to discussquestions about what happened in the first part of the story and make pre-dictions about how the story might end. After reading the second part of thestory, the students discussed what happened and how the problem in thestory was solved. The goal of the reading comprehension activities was toimprove children’s comprehension of what they had read by discussingthe story with a peer. The activities were also intended to promote activecomprehension.

Vocabulary development. Vocabulary knowledge is another criticalaspect of skilled reading. Not only is knowing the meaning of the wordsnecessary to understand connected text, this knowledge can also helpchildren to decode words that are unfamiliar in their printed form (Adams,1990). Although the rate of children’s vocabulary growth far outpaces the

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number of words that can be taught through explicit instruction (e.g., Nagy& Scott, 2000), children’s vocabulary knowledge does benefit from theinclusion of specific vocabulary instruction (Beck & McKeown, 2007). Inthe RAILS program, teachers provided explicit instruction on vocabularywith a focus on concept development. Early lessons (i.e., those at the kinder-garten level) taught vocabulary words common to school learning tasks.Later vocabulary lessons explicitly taught vocabulary taken from the con-text of stories children were going to read, either during listening or readingcomprehension lessons.

For each story that was read in the comprehension strand, two to threewords were selected for vocabulary instruction. To identify words appropri-ate for this instruction, we considered several criteria: (a) children wereunlikely to know the meaning of the word, (b) the meaning of the wordplayed an important part in understanding the story, and (c) the relationshipbetween the part of the text in which the word appeared and elements of thenarrative structure. In addition, we looked for words that contained proper-ties that complimented instruction in the word reading strand. Obviously, itwas not possible to always locate words that matched each of these criteria,but efforts were made to match as many as possible.

The teachers taught vocabulary explicitly by stating the word and provid-ing the definition. Children practiced the word and definition through groupand individual turns. As the word was taught, teachers showed the word inprint to help children build connections between oral and visual forms of theword. As the lesson progressed, teachers often invited students to expand onthe given definition and elaborate their understanding. When the new wordswere encountered in the story, children again practiced the definition anddiscussed the meaning of the word in the context of the story.

Reading fluency. In recent years, reading educators have becomeincreasingly aware of the need to support children’s development of readingfluency. Fluency, often described as the bridge between word reading andcomprehension, involves accurate and automatic word recognition, as wellas reading with expression (Rasinski, 2004). When children can readfluently, cognitive resources are freed from attention to lower level demandsand can be applied toward higher level comprehension processes (Kuhn &Stahl, 2003). Although a variety of specific techniques have been proposedto promote fluency (Kuhn & Rasinski, 2007), they all share one criticalfeature: often and repeated practice with the reading of connected text.

In the RAILS program, instruction on reading fluency began in the latterpart of first grade, as soon as children began to read independently, andcontinued through second grade. The students engaged in partner reading,in which children read aloud to a partner while a peer listened. Students

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alternated reading and listening roles with each paragraph. The goal of thepartner reading activity was to provide a high quantity of oral reading prac-tice to help students develop reading fluency, an important element to facili-tate proficient reading comprehension. Partner reading took place daily andincluded opportunities to reread earlier texts. This type of consistent andrepeated practice is critical to help children develop the automatic skillsnecessary to support both fluent reading and comprehension (Kuhn &Rasinski, 2007).

Curricular Integration

Psychological models of the reading process typically parse apart the cogni-tive mechanisms involved into a series of specific reading abilities. In herseminal book Beginning to Read, for example, Adams (1990) described wordreading through a series of three processes: the orthographic processor forrecognizing and dealing with visual letter symbols, the phonologicalprocessor for processing phonemic sounds, and the meaning processorfor handling vocabulary knowledge. Similarly, in his model of reading,Stanovich (1984, 2000) discussed the interactions between bottom–up andtop–down reading processes. Although these models discuss reading throughthese separable abilities, equal emphasis is placed on the idea that readingrequires fluent, coordinated, and integrated use of these abilities. Moreover,in learning to read, ‘‘the parts of the reading system must grow together.They must grow to and from one another’’ (Adams, 2004, p. 1221).

These models greatly influenced our conceptualization of effectiveinstruction for struggling readers. On the one hand, we knew that planfuland systematic instruction was necessary to build knowledge and skillswithin specific reading abilities. It was in this spirit that the four curricularstrands of the instructional program were developed. Just as important,however, we also believed that the structure of the instruction must supportchildren’s understanding of how these abilities are related. Specifically, aschildren learn to read, the instructional environment must help them tobuild the internal connections that integrate the various specific abilities.Accordingly, we believed that an effective reading program must be con-cerned not only with the balance of children’s development across readingabilities, but also with the integration of these components (Van Meteret al., 2002).

According to psychological models of reading, these connections aremade at the element level. Thus, when the visual symbol for the r is connec-ted with the phonetic representation of =r=, a link is made between ortho-graphic and phonological processors (Adams, 1990, 2004). Furthermore,when the r is shown in the vocabulary word ripe, and the teacher says the

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word=ripe=, connections can be made between meaning, orthography, andphonology. When ripe is encountered and explicitly pointed out in a sub-sequent story, children are supported in building connections between wordreading, vocabulary, and comprehension processes. These connections areimperative for skilled reading as they permit children to understand howlower level reading processes (e.g., word recognition) are related to higherlevel reading processes (e.g., comprehension).

In the development of lessons for the RAILS program, we paid particularattention to how connections across the strands could be made transparentand explicit for children. Toward that goal, lessons were organized withinand between strands so that elements would match across the strands.One obvious example of this integration is the embedding of vocabularywords in the stories used as part of the comprehension strand. As notedearlier, several of the criteria that guided the selection of vocabulary wordsinvolved attention to connections between vocabulary and other readingabilities.

Another way in which this goal was realized in the RAILS programinvolved the selection of stories in which the elements of word readinginstruction would be made salient. For example, when students were learn-ing the h sound–symbol relationship in the word reading strand, the teacherread the story The Woman Who Sold Hats during the listening comprehen-sion strand. This integration not only contextualized what was taught, butalso provided a variety of kinds of practice. Although teachers typicallydid not engage in explicit word reading instruction in the midst of compre-hension lessons, they would point out the presence of the element and guidechildren in practice.

Efforts such as these were carried out throughout the development of theRAILS program. In addition, teachers explicitly drew children’s attention tothese connections by pointing out overlapping elements. Through this mech-anism, the RAILS program supported children in developing skills acrossthe range of specific reading abilities, as well as acquiring an understandingof the connections across these abilities.

Instructional Cycle

Previous research has well documented the efficacy of explicit instructionfor promoting student achievement in literacy instruction, particularlyfor disadvantaged and low achieving students (Foorman et al., 1998;Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986). In explicit instruction, the teacher leads anddirects instruction, provides systematic practice with feedback, andreteaches material when incorrect student responses indicate flaws in stu-dents’ understanding. Effective explicit instruction actively engages students

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through a high quantity of practice and increases the probability of successby providing systematic instruction and feedback.

Each lesson in each curricular strand used a similar cycle of explicitinstruction. The teacher initiated the instructional activity by presentingnew information to the students (e.g., introducing vocabulary words). Theteacher engaged students in guided practice following the presentation,guiding them in their initial use of the new instruction and providing feed-back when necessary. Once students exhibited some degree of understandingof the new skills (as noted by correct responses during practice), they typi-cally moved on to more independent practice. For example, older studentsengaged in follow-up activities (as described) at their seats, typically work-ing with a peer.

Extension Activities

In addition to the explicit instruction lessons described with curricularstrands, teachers in RAILS classrooms were also encouraged to engage stu-dents in extension activities that provided opportunities for children to useand practice their developing skills in different contexts. These extensionsinvolved more student-directed activities and engagement in connected liter-acy behaviors. In one activity that was described for teachers, for example,children practiced using new vocabulary words and the elements of narra-tive structure to create their own stories. In addition, classroom teacherswere encouraged to retain other literacy activities that were a part of theirmore traditional instruction. In classrooms, for example, there were freereading periods and some of the teachers had audiotapes so that childrencould read along in story books. Classroom teachers also involved childrenin typical literacy activities such as reviewing the morning message or writ-ing letters home. Although the RAILS program emphasized the explicitinstruction lessons described within curricular strands, teachers wereencouraged to incorporate extension activities whenever possible to enrichchildren’s literacy experiences.

METHOD

Population

The participating schools were three low-achieving schools in a small cityschool district in central Pennsylvania. The school district served a mix ofworking class and lower class families, with 45.8% of the students in the dis-trict receiving free or reduced-price lunch. The three participating schools

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ranged from 61.8% to 79.5% of students in free or reduced-price lunch,averaging 70.6% of the students in the study receiving free or reduced-pricelunch. The majority (94%) of students were Caucasian and spoke English astheir first language. The students in the participating schools were lowachieving on standardized achievement tests. The average initial achieve-ment for both the RAILS and comparison groups was below grade levelnorms. Grade equivalent scores of the students’ initial achievement arepresented in Table 1.

Students in kindergarten through second grade and self-contained specialeducation classrooms participated in the study. Table 2 describes the num-ber of classes and students at each grade level in each group. Kindergartenwas a half-day program, so each teacher taught two classes (except for oneteacher in each group, who taught one class for a half-day).

TABLE 1

Initial Reading and Language Ability (Grade Equivalent Score)

RAILS Comparison

Grade Reading Language Reading Language

Kindergarten PK K.5 PK K.5

First K.3 K.3 K.3 K.3

Second 2.0 2.0 2.0 2.1

Primary special education PK PK PK PK

Intermediate special education 1.9 2.1 2.0 2.2

Note. RAILS¼Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies.

TABLE 2

RAILS and Comparison Classes and Students by Grade

RAILS Comparison

Grade Classes Students Classes Students

Kindergarten 3 84 3 54

1st 3 62 4 67

2nd 3 50 3 58

Primary special education 2 33 1 17

Intermediate special education 1 18 1 19

Totals 12 247 12 215

Note. RAILS¼Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies.

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The special education classes were self-contained classes for studentswhose disabilities were not well accommodated in the structure of the dis-trict’s regular classrooms. Students in these classrooms were significantlybelow their peers in academic performance or related behaviors. The classeswere comprised of children with a variety of disabilities, including severelearning disabilities, developmental disabilities, severe speech and languagedisabilities, and Asperger’s Syndrome.

Design

The study used a quasi-experimental design with matched comparisonclasses in both regular education and special education. To guard againsttreatment diffusion, assignment to condition was made at the school level.This assignment took place in a meeting between building principals andproject staff. At that meeting, the three principals agreed to participateand two of the three schools were chosen to implement the experimentalRAILS model in their primary classes. Thus, although teachers were notrandomly assigned to condition, it was also the case that RAILS teacherswere not volunteers implementing the program.

During the first year of the study, RAILS was implemented in kindergar-ten and first-grade regular education and primary grade special educationclasses. In the second year, we added second-grade regular education classesand the intermediate-grade special education class. In this way, all thestudents in these analyses except for the kindergarten students were in theRAILS program for 2 years. The regular education kindergarten studentsused the RAILS program for 1 year. Table 2 indicates the number of classesand number of students at each grade level.

Matched Comparison Group

The three schools were of similar socioeconomic status: School 1 (RAILS)had 79.5% of students on free and reduced-price lunch, School 2 (RAILS)had 61.8% free and reduced-price lunch, and School 3 (comparison) had70.4% free and reduced-price lunch. The classes were matched on initialreading achievement, so there were no significant differences between theRAILS and comparison groups on reading or language achievement. Theseachievement scores are given in more detail in the Results section.

Treatments

Experimental. We trained the teachers in the RAILS model during thelate summer, prior to the beginning of the school year. The training lasted

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for 2 days and included explanations of the procedures and instructions onhow to use the RAILS lesson manual. During training, project staff mod-eled the lessons and teachers were given the opportunity to practice andreceive feedback. The project provided the teachers a detailed manual thatexplained how to implement each component of the RAILS program. Themanual and supporting material contained all of the instructional materialsrequired to use the RAILS procedures with their district-adopted readingseries. In addition, the RAILS project provided the kindergarten andfirst-grade teachers with a collection of trade books and lessons for imple-menting the listening comprehension lessons.

During the first months of implementation, the project staff coached theteachers on the RAILS procedures. This involved observing the teachersduring reading instruction and providing feedback to improve the qualityof implementation. On average, the teachers were observed at least twicea week during the first 3 months of implementation. As the teachers becameproficient, the classroom observations diminished. By the second year, theproject staff observed teachers in their second year of implementationapproximately twice a month. Throughout the research, the project staffconducted meetings with teachers to discuss the program and its implemen-tation. Initially, the meetings were held monthly, but by the second year, themeetings were reduced to approximately once every 2 months. In thesemeetings, the discussions focused on the principles of instruction that wereused in the RAILS program, answering teachers’ questions, and resolvingobstacles to program implementation.

Comparison. The comparison teachers used traditional reading instruc-tion methods with the district-adopted reading series. All of the teachers inthe district used the Houghton Mifflin Reading series (Cooper et al., 2001).The comparison classes relied exclusively on the series for activities andmaterials for their reading instruction. They followed the teacher’s manualdirections for introducing stories, teaching vocabulary, and for conductingfollow-up activities. The majority of the student practice activities camefrom the reading series workbooks and from the suggested activities inthe teacher’s manual. The comparison teachers had approximately the sameamount of time allocated for reading instruction and the same number ofstudents in their classes.

Measures

Achievement test. The project used the Metropolitan AchievementTest, 7th Edition (Balow, Farr, & Hogan, 1992), as the pre- and posttestfor the study. For kindergarten, the reading subtests included word

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recognition, auditory discrimination, visual discrimination, and letter recog-nition. The language subtest was receptive vocabulary (language). For firstand second grade, the reading subtests were vocabulary (selectingsynonyms) and comprehension, and the language subtest on receptivevocabulary.

Phonemic awareness assessment. A stratified random sample ofstudents in kindergarten and first grade were also given an individuallyadministered, experimenter-designed assessment that measured knowledgeof letter–sound relations, telescoping, segmenting words, word reading,and sentence reading. The letter–sound subtest assessed children’s abilityto correctly say the sound of randomly ordered letters in a 1-min interval.If there was no response for 5 sec, it was coded as a nonresponse and treatedlike an error. The score on this subtest was the number of correct responsesin 1 min. There were 45 letter prompts, so scores ranged from 0 to 45.

The telescoping subtest assessed children’s ability to say a one-syllableword made up of three sounds correctly when given the sounds in the word.For example the examiner would say ‘‘ffff uuuu lllll,’’ to which the correctresponse was ‘‘full.’’ This subtest assessed student’s phonemic ability of put-ting sounds together into a meaningful whole. The examiner recorded thenumber of correct sounds in the student’s response. There were 6 promptseach with three sounds, so scores ranged from 0 to 18.

The segmenting test involved saying a one syllable (3 sounds, 3 to 4letters) word to the student. The student was to say each individual soundin the word, segmenting the word into its component phonemic parts. Thissubtest assessed students’ ability to break words down into their componentphonemic sounds. For example, the examiner would prompt by saying‘‘fog,’’ and the correct student response would say the three sounds in order:=f==o==g=. The examiner scored the student’s response by noting how manyof the three sounds they said correctly. There were 6 words, so students’scores ranged from 0–18 on this subtest.

The word reading subtest asked students to read aloud 12 phoneticallyregular, one-syllable words (e.g., hip) and 10 one syllable nonwords (e.g.,shoom). This subtest assessed students’ ability to read words in isolation.We included nonwords to assess students’ ability to use their phonics skillsto sound out words they had not previously encountered. This componentof the subtest also allowed us to differentially assess students who knewwords from more whole word instruction from those that had masteredphonics skills. It was highly likely that students who learned in a whole-word approach, as opposed to a phonics approach, would be less likely tocorrectly read the nonwords on the subtest. If a student did not respondto any of the prompts in 5 sec, they were told to go on to the next word.

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The student’s score on this subtest was the total number of correct responsesacross word and nonwords. Scores ranged from 0 to 22.

The sentence reading subtest assessed students’ ability to read wordsaloud in the context of a meaningful sentence. Initial sentences were shortand simple (e.g., ‘‘Tom can run fast.’’), and they gradually became longerand more difficult (e.g., ‘‘The dog laid down on the hard, bare ground.’’).The examiner noted any errors the child made during the oral reading.Any time the child paused for 5 sec, the examiner provided the word andit was marked as an error. The student’s score was the total number ofwords read correctly. There were 9 sentences ranging from 4 words to 9words long. Scores on this subtest ranged from 0 to 67.

In the analyses, the scores of the 5 subtests were added together to comeup with an overall phonemic awareness score. This measure was intended asa more proximal measure of the impact of the explicit phonemic analysisand word attack instruction in RAILS. The subsample for this measurewas determined by stratifying students by their initial ability, then randomlyselecting 4 students from each ability level in each class to be tested. Thephonemic awareness assessment was administered as a pretest in the falland as a posttest in the spring. The interrater reliability of this measurewas .91 on the pretest and .89 on the posttest.

Reading fluency assessment. The reading fluency assessment wasused as a posttest only. A stratified random sample of students (as describedpreviously) in first and second grade was administered a timed oral readingassessment. The reading fluency measure was administered individually,with each student doing a 1-min timed oral reading of a passage. The pass-age was 247 words long. All miscues were recorded and the student’s scorewas the number of words read minus the number of miscues. This measurehad an interrater reliability of .91.

RESULTS

Because the study involved teachers in two treatments across three gradelevels, we first analyzed whether there was a grade by treatment interaction,to determine if the treatment had a differential effect at different gradelevels. These analyses were done using an individual-level ANOVA. Theanalyses indicated no significant interactions on either reading achievement;F(2,391) < 1.0, p > .10; or language; F(2,391)¼ 1.3, p > .10. Because therewere no grade-by-treatment interactions, we converted all achievement testscores to z scores and collapsed the results across grade levels. This providedmore power for subsequent statistical analyses.

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Achievement Tests

Pretests. The Metropolitan Achievement Test, 7th Edition (Balowet al., 1992) was used as a standardized measure of students’ readingachievement. To compare these scores across grade levels, the raw scoreswere converted into z scores so they could be collapsed across gradelevels. An individual level ANOVA was computed on the pretest scoresto determine if there were initial differences between the groups. An indi-vidual level ANOVA was used to increase the sensitivity of the analysesto identify existing pretest differences. Although the groups were initiallymatched, student attrition during the project may have led to differencesin initial achievement of those students who remained. The analyses indi-cated no significant pretest differences on reading; F(1,391)¼ 1.6; or lan-guage; F(1,391)¼ 2.4; both p > .05. Although there were no significantdifferences on initial achievement, the RAILS students had lower averageinitial achievement than that of the comparison students, as shown inTable 3.

Posttests. Initial posttest analyses were conducted using an ANCOVAwith individual as the unit of analyses. Although there were no significantpretest differences, pretest scores were correlated with posttest scores andmet the assumption of homogeneity of variance across conditions. Underthese conditions, using pretest scores as a covariate increases the powerof the analyses by reducing the error variance. The results indicated signifi-cant treatment effects on measures of reading achievement; F(1,458)¼ 14.79,p < .001; and language achievement; F(1, 458)¼ 14.45, p < .001. The meansand effect sizes are presented in Table 3.

TABLE 3

Reading and Language Achievement: Means, aStandard Deviations, and Effect Sizes

RAILS Comparison

Condition and test Mean SD Mean SD d b

Pretest

Reading �.05 (1.0) .08 (1.0) �.13

Language �.07 (1.0) .09 (.9) �.16

Posttest

Reading .13 (1.0) �.09 (1.0) þ.22

Language .12 (1.0) �.13 (1.0) þ.25

Note. RAILS¼Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies.aZ-score means collapsed across grade level.bCohen’s d.

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In this study, students were nested within classroom and classrooms (tea-chers) were nested within school and within treatment. In such a design,there is the potential for both teacher effects and school effects in spite ofinitial attempts to match groups, as described. Although there were an insuf-ficient number of schools to adequately disentangle school effects in thisstudy, we did use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; Raudenbush, Bryk, &Congdon, 2000) as a way to disentangle the treatment effects from theclassroom=teacher effects. The HLM analyses used classroom and treat-ment to predict students’ reading and language achievement test scores.

The HLM analyses indicated a significant positive effect for RAILS onboth reading achievement; t(22)¼ 3.11, p¼ .006; and language;, t(22)¼3.15, p < .005. As shown in Table 3, the RAILS students scored .22 stan-dard deviations higher on reading achievement, and .25 higher in languageachievement. Given that standardized tests are designed to be stable, themagnitude of these effect sizes is of practical importance. The HLM model-ing of the treatment accounted for 31% of the variance in students’ readingachievement and 54% of the variance in their language achievement.

Phonemic Awareness

Pretest. Phonemic awareness skills were assessed using an experimenter-designed measure that included subtests that measured letter recognition,blending, segmentation, sentence reading, and nonsense word reading. Anoverall phonemic awareness measure was computed by adding the correctresponses on these subtests. The pretest means and standard deviationsfor this measure, for both RAILS and comparison classrooms, are shownin Table 4. The phonemic awareness test was administered to students inkindergarten and first grade in the fall and again in the spring. An individuallevel ANOVA was used to increase the power to determine if there wereinitial differences between the groups on phonemic awareness skills. In the

TABLE 4

Phonemic Awareness: Means, Standard Deviations, and Effect Sizes

RAILS (n¼ 86) Comparison (n¼ 61)

Mean SD Mean SD d a

Pretest 45.85 (34.1) 47.33 (35.6) �.04

Posttest 87.37 (47.9) 73.67 (44.8) þ.30

Note. RAILS¼Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies.aCohen’s d.

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fall, there were no significant differences between the treatment groups ontheir phonemic awareness scores; F(1,148) < 1.0. As indicated in Table 4,the phonemic awareness scores of students in both RAILS and comparisonclassrooms were very similar on the pretest measure.

Posttest. To evaluate the effects of the RAILS program on students’phonemic awareness skills, the scores on the spring administration of thisposttest were compared across RAILS and comparison classrooms HLManalyses indicated a significant effect on phonemic awareness; t(15)¼ 2.93,p¼ .011, with students in RAILS significantly outperforming studentsin comparison classes on phonemic awareness. As indicated in Table 4,students in RAILS scored þ.30 standard deviations higher than did thosein the comparison classes.

Reading Fluency

Measures of reading fluency were taken in both RAILS and comparisonfirst- and second-grade classrooms at the end of the school year (posttestonly). Reading fluency was operationalized by counting the number ofwords a student read correctly, minus incorrectly read words, during 1min of reading connected text. HLM analyses on the reading fluency mea-sures indicated a significant effect on reading fluency, t(12)¼ 2.51, p¼ .028.The means, shown in Table 5, indicate that the RAILS students significantlyoutperformed the comparison students in reading fluency, with an effect sizeof þ.36 standard deviations.

DISCUSSION

A unique contribution of this research is the attention paid to the inte-gration across curricular strands. In learning to read, children must develop

TABLE 5

Reading Fluency: Means, Standard Deviations, and Effect Sizes

RAILS (n¼ 77) Comparison (n¼ 67)

Mean SD Mean SD da

Posttest 57.4 (32.2) 46.57 (27.4) þ .36

Note. RAILS¼Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies.aCohen’s d.

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not only knowledge and skills within specific reading abilities, but alsodevelop these abilities in conjunction with one another. The interconnec-tions across these abilities allow for them to be used in coordinated waysduring literacy activities. In the RAILS program, we addressed this needby attending to the connections that could be made across curricularstrands.

We believe that it is the lack of attention to integration as a critical needthat has contributed to much of the confusion about what defines balanceand what distinguishes effective balanced programs from less effective pro-grams (Van Meter et al., 2002). Although the need for integration isaddressed in the literature on balanced instruction, there is little explicitattention paid to how this can be achieved. In his urging that educatorsavoid designing ‘‘frankenclasses,’’ for example, Stahl (1998b) acknowledgedthe danger of classrooms that have many important parts, but lack coherentorganization. He stopped short, however, of identifying a specific designprinciple that may move classrooms from the realm of horror movies intounified, coherent instruction.

Likewise, the importance of integration in classroom instruction comesthrough in the work of Pressley and colleagues (e.g., Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, & Hampston, 2006; Wharton-McDonald et al., 1998) onexemplary Grade 1 classrooms. In this research, observations were madein both exemplary and ‘‘good’’ reading classrooms in an effort to locatethe instructional elements that made the exemplary classrooms so effective.A number of distinguishing characteristics were found such as effective useof scaffolding and high-density instruction. Also contained in this list is theobservation that instruction was well integrated (Wharton-McDonald et al.,1998).

It is not our contention that the other elements on this list are unimport-ant. Rather, we argue that integration should be removed from within thelist and elevated to the position of a central organizing principle throughwhich instructional activities can be understood. To understand this, letus briefly consider a student’s experiences in a reading program. First, pho-nemic awareness and phonological processing skills are taught in which thestudent learns that words can be parsed into separable sounds and soundscan be manipulated to make words. Letters are also taught, often in con-junction with their phonetic properties. Classrooms also contain rich lan-guage experiences in which the child is exposed to a variety of vocabularywords and literacy activities. The student moves from one of these lessonsto the next, all in the hopes of putting the pieces together and developingthe skills of an independent reader. The problem that one mustrecognize, the problem that we sought to address in the RAILS program,is that for the uninitiated, the relationships across these instructional

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activities are not transparent. Thus, there is a need for these connections tobe made explicit within the context of the instruction.

LIMITATIONS

The design of this study was limited in that there were an insufficientnumber of schools to adequately disentangle potential school effectsfrom class-level effects and treatment effects. Although these resultsare positive and promising, larger scale field trials of the RAILS modelare warranted to further elaborate the effects of the model on student’sachievement.

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