OVERVIEW

Sound Partners (Vadasy et al., 2004) is a phonics-based tutoring program that provides individual explicit instruction in early reading skills to students who need it most. The program was specifically developed to reduce the number of students identified with reading disabilities by supplementing reading instruction for: first graders at highest risk of reading failure, second and third graders below grade level in reading, and students just learning the English language. Sound Partners is designed to enable paraeducators to provide effective instruction in the early reading skills most predictive of reading achievement. In addition, Sound Partners has been used successfully by parents who home-school their children.

Findings from a report on the longitudinal follow-up of Sound Partners students through the end of grade 3 will be summarized soon. Stay tuned.

TRAINING

Local Training - With U.S. Department of Education grant funding, we are currently offering no-cost Sound Partners trainings for schools and home school associations in the greater Seattle area. Please e-mail partners@wri-edu.org to request training.

Non-Local Training - contracted through Educational Resources, Inc. (ERI), a professional development company. Educational Resources, Inc (ERI) provides site-tailored staff development training on Sound Partners.

ERI is lead by Paul McKinney, Molly Blakely, and Ed Schafer. Together, they have over 75 years of experience helping schools nationwide to successfully implement scientifically based explicit instruction programs. ERI has assembled a cadre of former superlative teachers and administrators to provide high-quality professional development on Sound Partners.

Non-Local On-Site Training Session

A Sound Partners trainer will travel to your school and conduct a four-hour training session for all staff who will be involved in the implementation of Sound Partners. The participants will receive hands-on training in the implementation of Sound Partners. The school is responsible for purchasing copies of Sound Partners prior to the On-site Training Session.

For more information contact Patricia Vadasy at partners@wri-edu.org or (206) 285-9317.

Non-Local Train-the-Trainers Workshop

A Sound Partners trainer will travel to your school district and conduct a one-day training session for all staff who will be involved in training district staff to implement Sound Partners. Participants will leave with the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct a four-hour training session and to provide consultation to staff implementing Sound Partners. Participants will receive copies of all professional development training materials. The school district is responsible for purchasing copies of Sound Partners prior to the Train-the-Trainers Workshop.

For more information contact Patricia Vadasy at partners@wri-edu.org or (206) 285-9317.

MATERIALS

All Sound Partners materials, including lessons, tutor handbooks, letter sound cards, implementation manuals, and story books can be purchased from Sopris West Educational Services. Please call 1-800-547-6747 or visit Sopris West for ordering information.

You can hear an audio file that contains Sound Partners letter and letter pairs sound practice (11.5 MB .mp3).

RESEARCH

Sound Partners Versions Tested: 1993-1997 - From 1993-1997, we pilot-tested Sound Partners in four Seattle elementary schools in a series of three experimental studies that compared tutored students to their nontutored peers. Since 1998, we have evaluated several versions of Sound Partners in four quasi-experimental studies to identify instructional components that are most effective when used by paraeducators. These findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals (see Research References).

A widely used indicator of program effectiveness is the effect size statistic, which is the difference between the mean scores of Sound Partners students' scores and those of nontutored controls expressed in terms of standard deviation units. Effect sizes (for differences expressed as means) of d = .20 are considered small, .50 are regarded as moderate, and .80 are regarded as large. As shown in Table 1 (below), Sound Partners' effect sizes have ranged from small to quite large, averaging d = .70 across all years. Additionally, we have illustrated overall effect sizes for specific interventions tested in the most recent four cohorts, 1998-99 through 2001-02, in Figure 1 (.pdf).*

*Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view figures and tables, as they are in Adobe's portable document format (.pdf). If you do not already have this free software, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html and download the program first.

Sound Partners Versions Tested: 1998-2002 – The most widely used educational indicator of a reading intervention's effectiveness is student performance on standardized (adjusted for age) reading measures. (A standard score of 100 generally indicates grade-level performance.) Sound Partners students have been assessed on standardized word attack, word identification, and spelling measures. A word attack test measures a student's decoding skills, one important beginning reading strategy, and a word identification test measures both decoding skills and sight word recognition. Mean overall pretest reading and spelling scores for Sound Partners students (Table 2) averaged 80.2, equivalent to the bottom 10th percentile. After approximately 40 hours of Sound Partners tutoring (or 80 tutoring sessions), students averaged 100.5 – equivalent to the 50th percentile (Table 3). Tutored students, on average, attained grade-level reading skills by the end of first grade. Please see our references page for Sound Partners publications.

FUNDING

In addition to a number of private donors (e.g., the Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundation), research on Sound Partners has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).