A Second Look at Reading First: Causation between instruction and test scores?
Sara Mead took a more careful look at the latest Reading First report on her blog Early Ed Watch. The discussion focused on the curious finding that late-awardees did better than the earlier cohort.
A Second Look at Reading First | New America Blogs
… researchers found evidence of both increased instructional time devoted to the 5 components, and improved reading comprehension test scores in the later group of schools. That makes intuitive sense: Reading First is based on the idea that implementing the 5 components of effective reading instruction will improve student reading, so the program is unlikely to improve student achievement in schools where it doesn’t also cause teachers to increase time devoted to the 5 components.
Mead suggests a causality here: increased instruction time on the 5C resulted in better test scores. I looked into the report to see if there is any analysis to shed light on this. To my surprise, all they presented there are means and estimated means. I can’t even find a correlation between the two variables across sites, schools, or individuals.
I doubt they didn’t look into this. Why wasn’t it reported?