Feasibility and Effectiveness of an Adolescent Glass-Analysis Reading Intervention Delivered Online by Lay Tutors

Many adolescents do not have the basic reading skills needed to successfully comprehend increasingly complex academic texts, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further disrupted reading achievement. These concerns motivate the present pilot study, which adapts the Glass-Analysis programme, a theoretically distinctive analytic phonics intervention, for online delivery by lay tutors. Fifth- and sixth-grade students (N = 34) with poor reading skills were alternately assigned to an intervention or waitlist control group. Intervention participants completed individualised sessions over 11-19 weeks. The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT-III) and Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE-2) were used to measure changes in reading skills. Tutors reached high fidelity at the end of training; technological barriers were minimal, and tutor and participant retention was high. Moderate effect size differences between the intervention and waitlist control group were observed for measures of decoding and rapid automatised naming, but the study was designed with low statistical power and none of the observed group differences were significant. We conclude the Glass-Analysis programme holds promise as a scalable and accessible reading intervention for adolescent struggling readers and that future work to more definitively test its effectiveness is warranted.