In this project, we conducted an experiment in which the effectiveness of a supplemental balanced and strategic reading intervention curriculum was used in a remedial program aiming on promoting the reading/writing competence of 4th- and 5th-grade disadvantaged poor readers. The program targets the decoding (character and word recognition), fluency, and reading comprehension strategies of the participants. Part I. We examined the effectiveness of the intervention curriculum that is developed for 4th –grade low achievers with a pretest-posttest non-equivalent group experimental design. Twelve teachers from disadvantaged schools who delivered the Hand-in-Hand afterschool remedial program to 4th graders were assigned to the experiment group and control group. The teacher-student ratio in both groups is 1 to 6. Another group of 6 teachers served as a control group. Teachers in the experiment group were prepared to being familiar with the teaching methods and materials that were developed by the researchers. The remedial program was be arranged in the first semester during a 15-week period with a total of 60 40-minute sessions. Researchers do not get involve the instruction of teachers in the control group. Teachers in the control group deliver their Hand-in-Hand program with their traditional methods. Part II. We examined the effectiveness of the researcher-developed intervention curriculum for 5th-grade low achievers. Students’ outcome measures are test scores at the levels of character, word, and reading comprehension. The control group receives intervention with traditional teaching methods. Results show that, compared to the control groups, the reading comprehension scores of the experiment groups outperformed the control groups, in both 4th-graders and 5th-graders. It implies that the researchers-developed curriculum successfully raised the reading comprehension of students, but did not show any effect at character and word levels.
