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A little tutoring goes a long way with kids SMART program makes a difference in how fast and how well students read From staff and wire reports Relatively untrained reading tutors who spend just 30 minutes a week with young children can help them develop better reading skills, according to a study of Oregon�s biggest tutoring program. Compared to a control group, children who were tutored in the SMART program at schools in the Rogue Valley and across Oregon were able to read faster and better understood the subtleties of what they read, the study found. The typical tutored student met state reading benchmarks in third grade, an important milestone that remained out of reach for the nontutored counterpart. SMART, or Start Making a Reader Today, employs 7,500 volunteers in schools across Oregon. They tutor about 10,000 students in kindergarten, first and second grades in low-income schools. The study by Eugene Research Institute is one of the first in the nation that tries to answer the question: Can volunteers make a difference? In the Rogue Valley, the answer has been an obvious yes to Cam McCandless, who manages the 1,145 SMART volunteer readers and an equal number of kids in Jackson and Josephine counties. "Any teacher will tell you that they wish they could get these kids the individual attention they need," McCandless says. "We�re able to get to those children who require that extra attention, and their skills not only really take off, but stay with them," McCandless says. "But the first thing they need is that extra attention." Almost no rigorous research had been done on the results of thousands of volunteer hours spent in schools around the country. Many reading experts say it takes a trained professional to get a struggling reader on track. "We have to know that we�re having an effect on kids or we wouldn�t continue," says Mary Jubitz, executive director of the Oregon Children�s Foundation, which runs SMART. "When we asked evaluators to look at it, our kids did so much better than the kids who had never had SMART that it knocked everybody�s socks off." Results from the students� second-grade year will be published next year in Reading Research Quarterly, the pre-eminent publication for research on reading. SMART was begun in 1992 by former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt. The idea was to make it easy for ordinary adults � mostly working people but also retirees, college students and homemakers � to pitch in at a school one hour a week. The program now gives children at more than 200 Oregon schools regular one-on-one help that the school could not otherwise afford � on a donated budget of about $3 million a year. Volunteers undergo only an hour or two of training, and actual tutoring is informal and unscripted. The results of the program were measured by Russell Gersten, Scott Baker and other researchers at Eugene Research Institute, which specializes in evaluating education programs and methods. U.S. Bank, a supporter of the SMART program, paid the $200,000 cost. Researchers started with 127 first-graders at six low-income schools, four near Eugene and two in Portland, whose teachers said they needed help with reading. Half the children were matched with a tutor for first and second grade. The other half, with the same reading pretest scores, went without. At the end of third grade, the 71 students still attending those schools were given individual reading tests. Like all third-graders, they also took the state�s reading benchmark exam. The tutored students read more fluently: Given a third-grade-level story to read aloud, SMART students correctly read about 65 words per minute vs. about 45 words per minute for the comparison group. State reading scores also showed a significant difference. Students not picked for SMART remained below grade level, while the average SMART student scored above the state benchmark. But the study also indicates that the early intervention in developing their reading skills is strong enough to stay with the kids throughout their educational careers, McCandless said. "It�s exciting," McCandless said. "Very exciting." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.