External Evaluation of the PAIRS Reading Intervention

Reading Corps provides supplemental reading interventions to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade in several states (Markovitz et al., 2022). Historically, Reading Corps interventions to second and third grade students in a 1-on-1 format where an AmeriCorps member (i.e., tutor) conducts each intervention session with one student. Interventions are scheduled to occur 5 days per week for 20 min per session. Tutors work with approximately 15 students, across kindergarten through third grade, per day. As such, this is a relatively intensive level of support. 

The purpose of this external evaluation was to examine whether the effect of a paired-version of a reading fluency intervention ("PAIRS") was not unacceptably worse than the effect for the traditional 1- on-1 fluency interventions used by Reading Corps. In the PAIRS intervention, a Reading Corps tutor conducts a reading fluency intervention with two students at a time. Due to the similar number of opportunities to respond, Reading Corps hypothesized that the PAIRS intervention would have similar effects to the 1-on-1 reading fluency interventions (i.e., business-as-usual). If so, the PAIRS intervention would provide a way to increase the number of students who receive Reading Corps tutoring services and increase the efficiency of the support Reading Corps tutors provide to their partnering school sites.