The Development of Children’s Strategic Processing in Reading Recovery

It was the purpose of this study to examine and describe first-grade children’s development of strategic processes for detecting and correcting errors, problem solving difficult or novel words, and confirming responses in order to be successful as they participated in Reading Recovery instruction, as opposed to simply increasing “item” knowledge (i.e., identifying more letters, recognizing more words, etc.) as is true so often in special assistance tutoring (Allington & Walmsley, 1995). Further, the intent was to investigate qualitative differences in children’s strategic processing and to determine if growth in strategic processing is related to differences in entry-level skills. And finally, this study investigated whether an extended evaluation format for running record analysis developed by the author could provide useful information about children’s progress toward independent, strategic reading. Participants in the study included 27 children who were receiving Reading Recovery instruction in four schools in a large Midwestern city. Running records of text reading (Clay, 1993a) were collected at three points in their programs and analyzed for strategic processing. A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to explore children’s development of the use of problem-solving strategies as well as the outcome of their attempts. This analysis revealed that as a group these children significantly increased their use of all strategies as suggested by behavioral indicators (e.g., substitution attempts, rereading, etc.) and decreased the number of unproductive attempts. Qualitative differences in strategic processing are discussed and implications for instruction are provided.