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What Works Clearinghouse

U.S. Department of Education
Institute of Education Sciences
  
Intervention: Reading Mastery

Effectiveness

No studies of Reading Mastery that fell within the scope of the Beginning Reading review 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 Reading Mastery.

Program Description1

Reading Mastery, one of several curriculum components that constitute the Scientific Research Associate’s Direct Instruction curriculum, is designed to provide systematic instruction in English language reading. Reading Mastery is a full-year curriculum and is available in two versions, Reading Mastery Classic levels I and II (for use in grades K–3) and Reading Mastery Plus, an integrated reading language program for grades K–6. The program begins by teaching phonemic awareness and sound-letter correspondence and progresses to word and passage reading, vocabulary development, comprehension, and building oral reading fluency. Later lessons emphasize accurate and fluent decoding while teaching students the skills necessary to comprehend and learn from expository text. Lessons are designed to be fast-paced and interactive. Students are grouped by similar reading level, based on program placement tests. The program includes placement assessments and a continuous monitoring component.

The WWC identified 61 studies of Reading Mastery that were published or released between 1985 and 2007.

Fifteen studies are within the scope of the review and have an eligible design, but do not meet WWC evidence standards.

  • Six use quasi-experimental designs, but do not establish that the comparison group was comparable to the treatment group prior to the start of the intervention.

  • Nine studies have a confounding factor, such as combining with other interventions, which makes it impossible to attribute the observed effect solely to Reading Mastery.

Thirty studies are outside the scope of the review because they have an ineligible design that does not meet WWC evidence standards, such as having no comparison group.

Sixteen studies are out of the scope of the review, as defined by the Beginning Reading protocol, for reasons other than study design.

  • Ten studies either do not include or report disaggregated results for students in grades K-3.

  • Six studies are not studies of the effectiveness of Reading Mastery or do not measure the impact of Reading Mastery in outcomes domains identified in the review protocol.
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly-available source: the program's website (https://www.sraonline.com/download/DI/Research/Reading/RM_Results_Brochure
_low.pdf, downloaded June 2008). Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
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