ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the six most promising or most popular interventions for which the existing evidence: Switch-on Reading intervention, Accelerated Reader intervention, Fresh Start intervention, literacy software intervention, Response to Intervention (RTI) and Summer School 2013 intervention. It then focuses on the overall approach used for all six studies. All of the studies that follow used the same basic design, involving only two groups – the treatment group receiving the intervention and a control group receiving standard practice. In all studies, the cases were randomised to group by schools, classes or as individuals. The chapter also describes how these interventions were implemented for the evaluations that follow, and the study designs and methods used to evaluate them. It then summarises the ensuing results. Six studies with very similar designs range from excellent (4) to weak (1), largely due to variation in attrition, and factors such as errors in identifying eligible pupils that were beyond the control of the researchers.
