Supplemental reading instruction for primary year students with reading difficulties

Over the last three decades, the development of evidence-based practices have resulted in the formation, evaluation, and identification of numerous practices in teaching reading to students who are at-risk of reading failure. However, many of these practices have not attained their potential to impact students’ reading-related outcomes as studies report the lack of implementation of these practices in school settings (e.g., Daniel & Lemons, 2018).

This impact initiative aims to bridge the research to practice gap that currently exists in providing reading instruction for students at-risk of reading failure and students with learning difficulties/disabilities (LD). Students who perform below-average on reading measures, compared to peers, are considered at-risk of reading failure, and include those identified with learning difficulties.

The goal of this impact initiative is to develop a corpus of open educational resources comprising lesson plans that embed evidence-based practices to support reading growth in primary grade readers at-risk of reading failure.

This project aims to provide teachers, teaching assistants, and care givers of Year 3 and 4 pupils who are at-risk of reading failure access to scripted lesson plans to help improve pupils' reading-related outcomes. Reading theories and current recommendations in the field form the foundation of these lesson plans that are multicomponent in nature (Daniel et al., 2021).