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by Denise Mayo Moore Ph. D. (Author)
Read for Freedom: A Literacy Model to Reduce the Next Generation of Prisoners is an insightful book that illuminates the impact of illiteracy in our country today. Illiteracy is a major risk factor and barrier to stable employment and higher education.
-Approximately 32 million adults in America are considered to be illiterate; about 14% of the adult population cannot read.-Two-thirds of students who do not read at the proficient level by the end of fourth grade have a 75% chance of failing to attain literacy proficiently and will most likely experience incarceration and/or the social service system. -Approximately 70% of male and female inmates score at the lowest proficiency level for reading.
Dr. Mayo Moore's research study is on the Success Program, a positive intervention model to raise the literacy skills of students, with conclusions and suggestions on its incorporation into at-risk student's curriculum.
-The results of this study show students were academically resilient.-The Success Program realized favorable results in: reading comprehension, reading fluency, instructional reading, and sight-word recognition.-The Success Program is cost effective and utilizes current personal and materials.
School districts are accountable for students achieving grade-level literacy standards. However, many third-grade students in Sun Valley Lake, New Jersey, are not achieving the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) literacy standard of proficient, which is defined as reading on grade level.
The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate whether the Success Program was effective at engaging struggling third-grade, African-American students in a supplemental literacy program that can be replicated by school districts with similar demographics. The Success Program's theoretical underpinnings are grounded in Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory and Zone of Proximal Development.
These theoretical frameworks are supported by the Response to Intervention (RTI) model, on which the Success Program is modeled. The conceptual framework in this study is the Resilience model. The students were selected using a nonprobability criterion sampling, which dictates a quasi-experimental design using a pre- and post-test method.
There were 100 students during two consecutive school years; 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. The study results indicated that for each school year, the 50 students who participated in the Success Program achieved statistically significant higher scores than the 50 students who did not participate for all four study variables: reading comprehension, oral reading fluency, instructional reading level, and sight-word recognition. The quantitative data indicated the Success Program is a viable intervention.
Therefore, this study leads to positive social change by providing educators in Sun Valley Lake as well as the additional 30 Abbott, New Jersey school districts as well as districts nationally with similar characteristics, strategies to increase the literacy skills of third-grade, African-American students.
