Selecting a Literacy Intervention and Planning for Implementation: A Guide

Abstract

Evidence‐based core instruction partnered with evidence‐based supplemental interventions are vital for students' literacy learning, particularly for students who need additional support (Petscher et al., 2020). Identifying instructional materials that reflect the translation of effective practices is challenging, (Solari et al., 2020) and made trickier by an abundance of commercialized and packaged literacy curricula, all claiming to be research‐ or evidence‐based. The tasks of finding, selecting, and implementing literacy interventions that are high‐quality, evidence‐based, and designed to meet the needs of students is not for the faint of heart, especially because school leaders often have difficulty distinguishing programs based on research evidence from those benefiting from good marketing (Schwartz, 2019). Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide school personnel responsible for implementing literacy interventions (i.e., classroom teachers, literacy specialists, special educators) and/or selecting literacy intervention programs (i.e., administrators, instructional coaches) with a step‐by‐step process informed by our study which surveyed North Carolina first grade teachers' literacy assessment and instruction practices in schools receiving Title I funding before and during the COVID pandemic.