SRA Corrective Reading

I have used SRA corrective reading with some junior high students I taught. I thought it was ok. I now work with K-3. I am using a program called Project Read. It is wonderful. It has a reading, writing, and comprehension strand. The program breaks everything down to the smallest parts and builds it from there. Let me know if you would like more info.

Cristal Hill

Hello,
I have experience SRA Corrective reading from both sides of the proverbial fence. My daughter has a ‘mild mental handicap’ and is reading at a 2-3 grade level and has made tremendous strides using above program. I believe the program works best with children that respond to Phonics based instruction. I think the program can be a bit ‘dry’; but with a dose of humor injected here and there, kids feel good about the success they experience. I highly recommend this series of reading programs.

I have had good success with Corrective reading. I too am a LD teacher for students in grades 3 - 5. Last year, I had a student who was in 3rd grade in my class that started the year at the Kindergarten level in reading, by the end of the year (with level A) he was reading at a mid-second grade level and comprehending what he was reading. Other students that I’ve had over the years that I’ve used Corrective with almost always saw at least a years growth. The kids are surprisingly motivated by the program, especially when there are points and incentives. They really work hard to read what is on the page. The program also works with accuracy and fluency (B1 and B2).

There are drawbacks though, it can be tedious for the instructor and lacks creativity, but students usually accept it because they really want to learn how to read.

Two points, from both sides of the argument:

(1) If a child is not reading and is falling further and further behind, and you get that child reading, good. Any program that works for a particular child is a lot better than nothing.

(2) But the SRA program does have some large and ugly flaws. In particular, the system of reading always and only one page at a time, and reading solely for the purpose of immediate testing, drills the kids into some mental habits that are damaging and very hard to eradicate later.

When kids taught in this style reach high school and college, they are not able to do sustained reading such as a chapter of a biology text or a full short story or a novel or a chapter of a geography text or a long math development. They get frustrated and demanded immediate and constant feedback. They are not able to do the kind of higher-order thinking required for real high school work and for success in college; they demand everything be instantaneous multiple-choice. They are not able to retain ideas over a semester or several years; they expect to be tested immediately and then to clear the memory banks for the next test. Many high school teachers fall into their trap and provide spoon-fed readings and multiple-choice tests; this just feeds the habit and makes it harder and harder to break until it’s a disaster waiting to happen in college.

Serious high school teachers and all college instructors beyond the remedial level bring these students to a screeching halt. They require reading long books, writing your own essays from scratch, doing comprehensive final exams covering a whole semester, solving multi-step math and science problems without a cheat sheet, referring back to and building on skills and knowledge taught over the previous classes, and so on. Then we teachers hear the moans and squeals of “She’s a bad teacher” “She doesn’t know how to teach,” “My last year’s teacher was so good, she never made me do anything like this” “You can’t expect us to do this stuff” and on and on.

At the senior high and college level, it’s almost impossible to turn this around. What you learn between five and ten years old goes deep into your personality and you assume it’s the law from on high. If you learned then that school consists of quick short-term memory exercises with multiple-choice guessing as the ideal tool to measure you, then you will be frustrated and angry when later teachers tell you that real learning is something else entirely. You will blame the teachers and the school for being “bad” and “not understanding” and “not supportive” and “not knowing how to teach” when unfortunately it’s your expectations of the teaching and learning situation that are flawed. You will fail, and then you will be a college dropout with a chip on your shoulder.

Across the USA, about 40% of people who start junior college succeed either in getting a degree or transferring to a four-year school; 60% fail or drop out. The rate for four-year colleges is better but still not good. The “successful” programs that are “helping” a lot of kids through high school are NOT really preparing them for adult expectations, either in college or the work force. Beware of “helping” so much that you lose the goals you were teaching towards in the first place. I mistrust SRA for just this reason.
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A suggestion: if you have a student who isn’t progressing any other way, and who does progress with SRA, well, again, learning to read at all is better than not learning, so use what works. But supplement with reading real books, and as soon as possible get the student working with other materials that have longer-term planning and higher-order thinking skills.