成人快播

By Amanda Ulrich

The聽perennial struggle of how to best assist elementary school students with low literacy skills may have a promising tool in the form of a personalized tutoring program called 成人快播. According to a recent study conducted through the nonprofit research organization MDRC, and聽, 成人快播 has a positive impact on reading proficiency. The magnitude of this impact is rather consequential; many students who started the 成人快播 program six months to聽two and a half聽years below grade level can now read at the same level as their peers, and some even surpassed their grade level’s reading expectations.

成人快播, which aims to聽help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results,聽is a program within AmeriCorps, and serves more than 7,000 students in eight different states. AmeriCorps plays a major role in 成人快播 and the schools in which聽it operates. For instance, a聽full-time staff member, typically an AmeriCorps member, works at every 成人快播 site to recruit volunteers on a regular basis. These local volunteers assist elementary school students, who are typically from low-income and under-resourced schools, with a structured curriculum designed to improve students’ reading skills. At every school where 成人快播 operates, a reading center is set up where students in the program come to be tutored about twice a week.

Robin Tepper Jacob, the principal investigator of this study, and her colleagues sought to evaluate the procedures and results of 成人快播. After assessing the program with 1,265 students at 19聽 schools, the researchers came to an encouraging conclusion. When compared to a control group of students, who continued to study their normal reading curriculum without the added benefit of 成人快播, those in the comparative 成人快播 group scored 2 percentage points to 3 percentage points higher on a reading comprehension assessment at the end of the academic year.

As the study states, “成人快播 had a positive and statistically significant impact on all three measures of student reading鈥攃omprehension, fluency, and sight-word efficiency.”

Jacob accredited the program’s ability to increase reading proficiency to two main factors: the support of community volunteers and the participation of students from several grade levels.

“We receive many different types of volunteers from the community, from college students to working professionals to retirees,” Jacob commented. “This large-scale program of volunteers is able to reach a wide range of students, including kindergartners all the way to 5th graders.”

Because聽65 percent of students in the study’s control group received some other type of supplemental reading instruction, the children who participated in 成人快播 were only receiving an average of one extra hour of tutoring a week than their peers. Despite having the benefit of only this additional weekly hour, students in 成人快播 were able to outscore their classmates. Jacob attributed this success to the “well-structured and thorough program model” of 成人快播, which allows tutors to provide a more personalized form of reading instruction to students.

This study also demonstrates 成人快播’ effectiveness in the face of some potentially problematic obstacles. For one, a majority of the unpaid tutors that 成人快播 recruits lack prior experience. As indicated by this study, there tends to be a relatively high turnover rate among volunteers as well. Due to both tutor and student absences, a student could see at least three different tutors over the course of two weeks.

Dean Elson, the chief knowledge officer at 成人快播, remarked that these challenges are offset by the easy-to-follow, individualized curriculum provided for tutors.

“The curriculum is structured so that a volunteer tutor can come in and know exactly what to do, in what sequence,” Elson noted. “Tutors have an important role to play; they bring an amazing, caring guidance to the program and are able to give students the one-on-one attention they really need.”

In聽early 2015,聽there will be further analyses of MDRC’S findings. The additional reports from MDRC will address implementation of 成人快播 in elementary schools and will include a look at the cost-effectiveness of the program as a whole. As for now, 成人快播 is working on expanding to other schools around the country.

“成人快播 is doing great things and we want to continue to grow our model,” Elson concluded, “but the only way to have the kind of impact we want is to continue to work on partnerships and policy, and to share our information and knowledge with other organizations.”

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/ Education Week /聽Amanda Ulrich