Introduction

Reading Recovery (RR) was developed by Marie Clay during the 1970s (Clay, 1979) while she was an academic staff member of the University of Auckland (one of New Zealand’s 8 public universities). The program was funded by the New Zealand Department of Education (later Ministry of Education) for adoption by schools throughout the country during the 1980s. As a preventive early intervention program designed for young children who have not benefitted from formal reading instruction after 12 months in school (Clay, 1985, 1993), the general aim of RR is to substantially reduce the incidence of reading failure by accelerating to average levels of performance the progress of 6-year-old children who show early signs of reading difficulty (normally children whose reading progress falls in the lowest 15% to 20% of the enrolment cohort in any given school).

Clay (1987) was very confident about the effectiveness of RR and the sustainability of gains made by students in the program. She claimed that RR “should clear out of the remedial education system all the children who do not learn to read for many event-produced reasons [i.e., environmental, cultural, or economic causes] and all the children who have organically based problems but who can be taught to achieve independent status in reading and writing despite this” (p. 169).

Similarly, the New Zealand Reading Recovery website claims that the program “is an effective early literacy intervention designed to significantly reduce the number of children with literacy difficulties in schools,” that forms part of the New Zealand literacy strategy (http://www.readingrecovery.ac.nz). The following section from the RR website (www.readingrecovery.ac.nz/reading_recovery ) is particularly confident in its claim:

The aim of Reading Recovery is to prevent literacy difficulties at an early stage before they begin to affect a child’s educational progress. Providing extra assistance to the lowest achievers after one year in school, it operates as an effective prevention strategy against later literacy difficulties. Nationally, it may be characterised as an insurance against low literacy levels” (emphases added).

Others have also claimed that RR leads to sustainable, long-term gains. Without offering any evidence, May et al. (2015), for example, stated that RR can disrupt the “trajectory of low literacy achievement, produce accelerated gains, and enable students to catch up to their peers and sustain achievement at grade level into the future” [emphasis added] (p. 549).

Surprisingly, there is no robust, well-designed research to support Clay’s claims about the promise of the RR program or to support the widely held view that RR is effective in New Zealand (e.g., McDowall, 2006, 2007, 2009; McDowall, Boyd & Hogden, 2005; Robinson, 1989; Smith & Elley, 1994). Despite the program being adopted for use in other countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States), relatively few well-controlled studies of the effectiveness of RR in any country have been published in peer-reviewed journals.