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Beginning Reading
Effectiveness
No studies of Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy that fall within the scope of the Beginning Reading protocol meet WWC evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy.
Program Description1
Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy, developed by the Houghton Mifflin Company, is an integrated K–82 reading and language arts program. The philosophy behind the program is that literacy instruction should stimulate, teach, and extend the communication and thinking skills that will allow students to become effective readers, writers, communicators, and lifelong learners. The program is structured around themes. It includes hands-on activities that allow students to collaborate or share information on a theme-related project with other classrooms around the world (for example, participating in a collaborative poem-writing exercise) and virtual field trips to Internet sites that have content, activities, and projects related to the theme.
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The WWC identified 4 studies of Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy |
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Two studies are within the scope of the protocol and have an eligible design, but they do not meet WWC evidence standards because they do not establish that the comparison groups were comparable to the treatment groups prior to the start of the intervention. One study is out of the scope of the protocol because it has an ineligible study design that does not meet WWC evidence standards; it does not use a comparison group. One study is out of the scope of the protocol as defined by the Beginning Reading protocol. Although some of the schools in the study used Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy, the study examined the impact of teacher practices on student literacy rather than the effectiveness of the intervention. |
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly-available source: the program’s website (http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/itl/intro/, downloaded October 2008). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
2 This review refers to studies of Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy in grades K-3. Studies of Houghton Mifflin: Invitations to Literacy in grades 4-8 were out of the scope of the Beginning Reading protocol.
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|Institute of Education Sciences