The perennial struggle of how to best assist elementary school students with low literacy skills may have a promising tool in the form of a personalized tutoring program called Reading Partners. According to a recent study conducted through the nonprofit research organization MDRC, and primarily funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) and the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), Reading Partners has a positive impact on reading proficiency. The magnitude of this impact is rather consequential; many students who started the Reading Partners program six months to two and a half years below grade level can now read at the same level as their peers, and some even surpassed their grade level's reading expectations.

Reading Partners, which aims to help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results, is a program within AmeriCorps, and serves more than 7,000 students in eight different states. AmeriCorps plays a major role in Reading Partners and the schools in which it operates. For instance, a full-time staff member, typically an AmeriCorps member, works at every Reading Partners site to recruit volunteers on a regular basis. These local volunteers assist elementary school students, who are typically from low-income and under-resourced schools, with a structured curriculum designed to improve students' reading skills. At every school where Reading Partners operates, a reading center is set up where students in the program come to be tutored about twice a week.

Robin Tepper Jacob, the principal investigator of this study, and her colleagues sought to evaluate the procedures and results of Reading Partners. After assessing the program with 1,265 students at 19 schools, the researchers came to an encouraging conclusion. When compared to a control group of students, who continued to study their normal reading curriculum without the added benefit of Reading Partners, those in the comparative Reading Partners group scored 2 percentage points to 3 percentage points higher on a reading comprehension assessment at the end of the academic year.

Full Article