A unique collaboration between Brock researchers, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) has laid the groundwork to improve the abilities of young children with reading difficulties.

The project shows the benefit of science-based reading interventions delivered through an effective partnership, indicating that children with reading difficulties who received the intervention Empower Reading: Decoding and Spelling (Grades 2-5) at their schools in Grade 2 or Grade 3 were able to catch up to grade-level reading proficiency by Grade 5. Earlier intervention yielded better results, but students in both years fell within the Grade 5 benchmark range.

Empower Reading includes 110 progressive lessons taught daily on strategies to help children decode new words.

The intervention has been developed over 35 years of research by Senior Scientist and Professor Emerita Maureen Lovett of SickKids and the University of Toronto and a team that includes Professor Jan Frijters of Brock’s Department of Child and Youth Studies as well as Karen Steinbach, Maria De Palma and Léa Lacerenza at SickKids.

Results of the project are detailed in a paper, “Empowering Schools to Implement Effective Research-Based Reading Remediation Delivers Long-Lasting Improvements to Children’s Reading Trajectories,” which appears in the Journal of Learning Disabilities. The study’s lead author, Brock Assistant Professor of Child and Youth Studies Erin Panda, completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the SickKids research team. She says the paper and partnership featured therein show how researchers and educators can take science from controlled lab environments and work it into people’s daily lives.

“This study, along with Maureen Lovett’s previous work, shows that almost all children who struggle with reading can overcome challenges and can learn to read if they receive evidence-based instruction,” says Panda. “We can change the course of somebody’s whole life, especially if these practices are in place early — but if we wait, there’s a bigger gap to overcome and it makes it much more challenging.”

Frijters says the results outlined in the paper are noteworthy in that students in the field showed comparable gains to clinical research participants. He attributes this to both the ground-up work by teachers, trainers and mentors and the top-down commitment of resources, monitoring and communication from school board administrators.

“Implementing a research-based solution needs a system solution,” he says. “With co-ordinated efforts by researchers, teachers, administrators and policy-makers, it is possible to scale proven reading interventions and provide all struggling students with the high-quality support they need to become proficient readers.”

Program Managers De Palma and Steinbach lead the team at SickKids responsible for training and mentoring teachers who will implement Empower Reading, which has reached some 5,500 teachers across more than 50 school boards since 2006 to serve more than 85,000 students across Canada and parts of the U.S.

“What we’ve learned from all of our work is the potential for kids to make really wonderful gains in their reading skills, and that even though not every student is going to make the same gains, all will make progress,” Steinbach says.

Sonia Zolis was a learning resource teacher with HWDSB in 2006 and part of the board’s first Empower implementation. In 2010, she became a special assignment teacher and trainer-mentor to continue to support the board’s use of Empower, a role she retired from in 2023. Today, she continues to work as part of the trainer-mentor team for SickKids, because the collaborative partnership fostered between trainers, mentors and teachers is crucial to the program’s success.

“At the end of the year, especially for teachers in their first year working with Empower, it’s like Christmas in June,” says Zolis. “The pre- and post-intervention data collected shows each child’s response to the program and the teachers can see how students have made gains on their individual learning-to-read journeys.”

The paper’s authors all stress the need for strong partnerships with teachers, principals and school boards to get the science of reading to the people who need it most.

“Over 35 years, we were very fortunate to find school boards that were wonderful partners, hungry for research findings and flexible enough to try new methods of instruction and new materials,” says Lovett. “This partnership is an example of how researchers and professionals from other institutions can work together with school boards to effect meaningful change based on the findings from research they do together.”