MCPER researcher Nancy Scammacca Lewis, Associate Director Greg Roberts, and Executive Director Sharon Vaughn, along with University of Houston colleague Karla Stuebing, have published an update to their wide-ranging meta-analysis of interventions for struggling readers. “A Meta-Analysis of Interventions for Struggling Readers in Grades 4–12: 1980–2011” will appear in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Currently, the article is published online. In the new publication, the authors expand their 2007 review to include studies published from 2005 to 2011, finding considerably smaller mean effects. The authors attribute the decline in effect sizes in part to “increased use of standardized measures, more rigorous and complex research designs, differences in participant characteristics, and improvements in the schools’ ‘business-as-usual’ instruction that often serves as the comparison condition in intervention studies.”
