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Program Description

Overview Begun in 1979, the Howard Street Tutoring Program provides after school remedial reading instruction through one-on-one tutoring to second and third grade children who have fallen behind their peers in reading. The program, which is a joint venture of the Reading Center at the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois and the Good News Educational Workshop in Chicago, operates in a neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago.
Start Date 1979
Scope local
Type after school, mentoring
Location urban
Setting community-based organization, private facility
Participants elementary school students in second and third grade
Number of Sites/Grantees one site
Number Served approximately 20 (1987–1988)
Components The Howard Street Tutoring Program operates four days per week from early October to late May from 2:30pm to 4pm. Two groups of approximately 10 second and third graders receive tutoring two afternoons a week—one group on Mondays and Wednesdays, the other group on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Participants are identified by their classroom teachers. Second and third grade teachers at a local low-income urban elementary school identify the lowest performing third of their class in reading and these children are given a comprehensive reading test. The 20 or so lowest performers on the test are invited to participate in the program.

Each child is paired with a volunteer reading tutor who works with that child for the duration of the program. The program supervisors, one for each group of 10 students, train the volunteers in appropriate reading instruction techniques and write individualized lesson plans for each student/volunteer pair. By the end of the school year, each student has received approximately 50 hours of one-on-one tutoring.

At 2:30pm, the program supervisors escort the children from their public school and walk the group over to the storefront two blocks away where the program is held. The children eat a snack of milk and cookies while listening to a story or playing a game until 3pm. At 3pm, the children are paired with their tutors and engage in the same daily activities: 15–20 minutes of contextual reading at the child's instructional level, 10–12 minutes of word study, 15 minutes of writing, 10–15 minutes of easy contextual reading, and 5–10 minutes of adult reading to the child. The program is over at 4pm and the children return home.
Funding Level $6,000 (1987–1988) (the combined salaries of the two supervisors)
Funding Sources not available


Evaluation

Overview The evaluation was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the Howard Street Tutoring Program during the 1986–1987 and 1987–1988 school years.
Evaluator Darrell Morris, Appalachian State University; Beverly Shaw and Jan Perney, National College of Education
Evaluations Profiled Helping Low Readers in Grades 2 and 3: An After-School Volunteer Tutoring Program, 1990
Evaluations Planned none
Report Availability Morris, D., Shaw, B., & Perney, J. (1990). Helping low readers in grades 2 and 3: An after-school volunteer tutoring program. The Elementary School Journal, 91(2), 133–150.


Contacts

Evaluation Darrell Morris, PhD
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
Tel: 828-262-2000
Email: morrisrd@appstate.edu
Program not available
Profile Updated August 13, 2002

Evaluation: Helping Low Readers in Grades 2 and 3: An After-School Volunteer Tutoring Program, 1990


Evaluation Description

Evaluation Purpose To determine the effectiveness of the Howard Street Tutoring Program, particularly in raising participants' reading levels.
Evaluation Design Experimental: In late September of 1986 and 1987, two second-grade teachers and two third-grade teachers identified the lowest 50 readers in their classrooms. The identified students were then pretested in word recognition, spelling, and basal passage reading. The children by classroom were then rank ordered from top to bottom, based on their word recognition score. Starting at the bottom of the list for each classroom, children with successive scores were paired. In each pair, one child was randomly assigned to the tutoring program and the second child to the control group, which received no after school tutorial instruction. These pairs of children, one in the treatment and one in the control group, sat next to each other in the public school classroom throughout the school year. In late May of 1987 and 1988, children in both the treatment and control groups were posttested with the same reading and spelling battery. Due to mobility of the student population and the availability of tutors, there were 17 children in the treatment and control groups, respectively, in 1986–1987, and 13 children in each group in 1987–1988.
Data Collection Methods Tests/Assessments: Treatment and control group students were both given a pretest and a posttest using the same reading/spelling battery during the school year. The tests covered word recognition, spelling, and basal passage reading. The pre-tests were administered in September of 1986 and 1987 for the two years of intervention, respectively, and the post-tests were administered in late May of 1987 and 1988.
Data Collection Timeframe Data were collected from September 1986 to May 1988.


Findings:
Formative/Process Findings

Activity Implementation Children were allowed to proceed at their own pace as lesson plans were customized for individual children.
Costs/Revenues
  • The cost of the books for the tutoring program did not exceed $500.
  • Each supervisor was paid $3,000 for the school year, both in 1986–1987 and in 1987–1988.
Recruitment/Participation Most of the children participated for only one of the two intervention years evaluated here, e.g., 1986–1987 or 1987–1988.
Program-School Linkages
  • The relationship between the tutoring program and the neighborhood school from which participants were drawn was “friendly, but limited” according to evaluators.
  • The school principal and classroom teachers supported the tutoring program and made it easy for the program to operate within the school by providing space for pretesting and posttesting, helping to get information forms home to parents, etc.
  • The reading instructional philosophy of the elementary school was to teach low readers at grade level regardless of their actual reading ability. This was in direct conflict with the Howard Street tutoring model which holds that readers should be taught at the level at which they are currently capable instead of the level at which they should be according to grade level. The conflict prevented meaningful cooperation between the tutoring program and the school; instead, the tutoring program felt that its responsibility was to offer a viable alternative to in-school teaching.
Staffing/Training
  • After 10 years of operation, recruitment of volunteers is not a challenge since Howard Street has a large word-of-mouth network.
  • Volunteer tutors have been undergraduate liberal arts majors in local universities, master's students in education looking for informal practicum experiences, suburban mothers whose children are away in college, retirees looking for meaningful volunteer work, etc.
  • Most tutors, especially the college students, only tutor for one year. However, a small group of suburban mothers returns year after year, finding the tutoring a collegial and rewarding experience.
  • The Howard Street program employs on-the-job training for tutors rather than preservice training since they have found it to be more effective.
  • The program begins with only two tutor/tutee pairs. On the first day of the program, the supervisor teaches the children while the tutors watch. On day two, the supervisor observes the tutoring sessions, answering the tutors' questions and providing constructive feedback. After three or four sessions with these two pairs, the supervisors phase in the next couple of tutor/tutee pairs following the same training protocol. This is repeated until all the pairs have been phased in by the end of November.
  • The supervisor of the tutors plays the most crucial role in a small tutoring effort like the Howard Street Tutoring Program. In the beginning, the supervisor's biggest challenge is to convince new tutors and tutees alike that they will be successful. The job also entails model teaching, discussion, lesson planning, and consistent encouragement.
  • According to the evaluators, the effective supervisor must possess the following characteristics: (1) theoretical knowledge of the beginning reading process, (2) experience in teaching beginners to read, (3) confidence that almost all children can learn to read and write, and (4) an ability to work constructively with adults in a mentor/apprentice relationship.
  • The supervisor job is part-time with only two hours per week of on-site supervision and up to six hours per week of lesson planning which can be done off-site.


Summative/Outcome Findings

Academic
  • Significant (p<.05) differences were found between the treatment and control group gains on all measures except for timed and untimed word recognition. On all achievement measures during both school years, including timed word recognition, untimed word recognition, basal word recognition, basal passages, and two measures of spelling, the treatment group had greater gains from the pretest to the posttest than the control group.
  • When all 30 children who received treatment during 1986–1987 and 1987–1988 are compared to the 30 children who comprised the control groups over both years, the score gains from the pre-test to the post-test favored the treatment group and are significant (p<.01) on four of the five achievement measures.
  • The most important of the achievement measures is the basal passage reading score, a measure of oral reading success on a set of graded passages. This score provides the best assessment of children's reading “instructional level” with every 10-point gain corresponding to a grade level. On average, the 30 students who received tutoring had a gain on the basal passage reading score of 12.2 while the 30 students in the control group had an average gain of 6.6. In other words, tutored students advanced more than one grade level in reading during the school year while students who did not receive tutoring only advance two-thirds of a grade level. This difference was statistically significant (p<.01).
  • There was greater variation in the basal passage reading scores of the tutored children than in the basal passage reading scores of the control group children. Not all tutored children advanced a full grade level during the school year, but 50% did as compared to only 20% of the control group. Also, only 23% of the tutored group made “limited progress,” defined as less than a five-point or half grade level gain in basal reading passage score, while a full 47% of the control group made “limited progress.” Finally, 34% of the tutored group made large gains in reading, more than 15 points on the basal passage reading score, while only 3% of control group students made similar gains.

 

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