“The biggest challenge for schools new to Bookworms is that its design is so different from traditional curriculum materials,” said Walpole, who specializes in literacy education in CEHD’s School of Education. “It’s not harder to teach the Bookworms way, it’s just different. There is so much more reading and so much more challenging reading, but students and teachers rise to the challenge.”

Bookworms is also unique in its instructional routines. All students — including those who have struggled with reading — read books selected for their grade level. Bookworms supports these students using teaching routines based on research in literacy instruction.

“The texts in the Bookworms curriculum are engaging to the students, and the level of pride when students complete an entire novel is very fulfilling,” said Becky Neubert, now principal of West Seaford Elementary School. “Each year, we learn more and more about how to teach children to read so our learning, as well as the students’ learning, is ongoing.”

Bookworms teachers also provide specific attention to skills development. In addition to shared reading and ELA instruction to build grammar and writing competence, students engage in small-group, differentiated skills instruction. During differentiation, students may practice phonemic awareness and word recognition, complete fluency work or participate in even more engaged reading depending on their needs.

Evaluating Bookworms 

To evaluate the impact of Bookworms, May and his co-authors followed seven cohorts of students across three school years and assessed achievement using Measures of Academic Progress reading scores. By modeling each student’s growth curve, the research team was able to estimate the change in students’ achievement trajectories corresponding to the implementation of Bookworms.

They found significant positive impacts. For example, Cohort C started fourth grade about 1 point behind Cohort B’s scores at the beginning of fourth grade. By the beginning of fifth grade, after Cohort C had experienced Bookworms for one year, Cohort C’s scores caught up to and even passed Cohort B’s average score by more than 0.2 points, which translates to a difference of more than 1.2 points in annual gains.

May and his co-authors found that Bookworms was especially helpful for students who struggled with reading. Students who began third grade with relatively weaker achievement experienced more growth than those with average achievement, and those with average achievement experienced more growth than those with the highest achievement.

The researchers’ data also suggests that the impacts of Bookworms for students qualifying for special education services are larger each year than for other students.

“Using only instructional routines from the broad sciences of reading and writing really matters for the achievement of groups of students whom we have often left out,” Walpole said. “I am proud of the results for students with disabilities in our recent study.”

To avoid conflict of interest, Walpole contributed to the descriptions of the Bookworms intervention and context in this study, but did not influence the study design or results. All activities related to study design, data management and statistical analyses were led by May.

To learn more about CEHD research in literacy and language, visit its research page.