Use of the SEARCH/TEACH Tutoring Approach with Middle-Class Students at Risk for Reading Failure

Participants in this study were 168 middle-class children who were screened, during kindergarten, by SEARCH as at risk for reading failure, on the basis of locally derived norms. These at-risk children were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 intervention groups: (a) TEACH, a perceptual remediation approach; (b) phonetic tutoring; or (c) no-contact control. The interventions were administered during first grade. Following the interventions, children were assessed with an individually administered test battery at the end of first and second grade. Group achievement data were also available for the at-risk sample and a randomly selected group of not-at-risk children matched to the at-risk controls. The only significant finding that emerged involved consistently higher word attack scores for children in the phonetic tutoring group over a 2-year period. When the effects of the intervention were examined within groups of vulnerable readers, marginally at-risk children in the phonetic group appeared to have profited the most from one-to-one tutoring, demonstrating significantly higher performance on word attack, phonetic analysis, and the test of written spelling. Finally, comparisons of at-risk and not-at-risk children indicted significantly lower academic performance for the at-risk group over a 2-year period. The results of the study call into question the effectiveness of the TEACH tutoring model. In addition, they indicate that one-to-one tutoring is not likely to result in comprehensive achievement gains if its focus is on narrow and isolated instructional activities.