Report Released on The Efficacy of PCI’s Reading Program — Level One
Empirical Education and PCI Education have released the results of a one-year randomized control trial on the efficacy of PCI’s Reading Program — Level 1 for students with moderate to severe disabilities. Conducted in the Brevard and Miami-Dade County school districts, the study found that, after one year, students in the PCI program had substantial success in learning sight words in comparison to students in the control group — equivalent to a 21 percentile point difference. Though researchers found that students’ grade level had no effect on achievement with the program, they found a small moderating effect of the phonological pre-assessment: students starting with greater phonological skills benefit more from PCI than students starting with lower scores. This report will be presented at the 2009 AERA conference in San Diego, CA. A four-year follow-on study is being conducted with a larger group of students in Florida.