An Integrated Data Approach to Exploring Variability in Reading Intervention Effectiveness - Persistent, intractable challenges with reading acquisition present critical educational and health concerns as reading is a known indicator of lifetime earnings, general health, and overall wellbeing (OECD, 2012). Decades of educational research has contributed to the development and testing of supplemental reading interventions that provide intensive, targeted support to promote achievement for students with or at-risk for reading disability (RD). However, to date, there has been no comprehensive exploration of how intervention effectiveness may vary based on students’ background. National data indicate that only 18% of Black students read at or above proficient levels in fourth grade, compared to 45% of White students (NAEP, 2019). This gap does not narrow with age, nor has it narrowed over time, raising important questions about how these differences contribute to long-term educational and health outcomes. Advancing our understanding of these gaps requires scientific inquiry that accounts for variation across populations most affected by documented health disparities. Progress in this area has been limited by the underrepresentation of Black students in educational and psychological research (e.g., Graham, 1992; Graves et al., 2021; Lindo, 2006), and a predominantly one-size-fits-all approach to intervention development and testing. Thus, the overall goal of the proposed project is to aggregate data from rigorous studies of supplemental reading interventions to investigate variability in outcomes across learner groups. We employ a cross-disciplinary framework that draws on a developmental systems perspective to emphasize the role of dynamic environments in shaping outcomes. This framework recognizes that interventions may not operate uniformly and that complex systems can influence effectiveness for different subsets of students. The proposed integrated dataset, representing more than 39 million dollars in federal research investment, will be archived and shared on the LDbase data repository. By leveraging the existing infrastructure of LDbase and previously committed NIH resources, we are uniquely positioned to address the overall goal of the research project through three specific aims (SA). First, we will assemble an integrated dataset with data from rigorous reading intervention studies (SA1). Second, we use these integrated data to determine whether intervention effects differ for Black students compared to their White peers (SA2). And finally, we identify characteristics of students, interventions, and outcomes that explain variation in response to reading interventions (SA3).
