Overview
Throughout this 5-year project, we aim to advance the understanding of the persistent disparities in reading achievement between Black and White students. We investigate potential sources of individual differences in intervention effects by aggregating data from multiple rigorous studies of supplemental reading interventions that provide intensive, targeted support to students with or at risk for reading disabilities (RD). To date, few studies separate findings by student race, making it difficult to know whether reading interventions deemed evidence based are generalizable and valid for Black students.
Purpose
In this project, we aim to explore racial differences in the effectiveness of supplemental reading interventions. The project is built on a cross-disciplinary framework that integrates bioecological systems theory, which recognizes sources of individual differences that stem from dynamic interactions within and between our social environments, with QuantCrit, a methodological subfield of critical race theory. Taken together, this framework recognizes that interventions are likely not race neutral, and complex systems may differentially affect the effectiveness of these interventions for certain groups of students.
Procedures
The overall goal of this project will be addressed through three specific aims. First, we assemble an integrated dataset with data from rigorous reading intervention studies. Second, we use the integrated data to determine whether there are differential intervention effects for Black students compared to their White peers. And finally, we identify characteristics of students, interventions, and outcomes that explain differential response to reading intervention for Black students as compared to their White peers. The integrated dataset will be archived and shared on the LDbase data repository, a data repository funded by the National Institutes of Health containing decades of knowledge from educational and developmental sciences.
Participants
This project uses deidentified student-level data from existing studies of supplemental reading interventions conducted with kindergarten to 12th-grade students in the United States. The IDARE project website outlines inclusion criteria for a dataset to become part of the IDARE project.