Other Orton-Gillingham Approaches
Mixed Evidence of Relative Effectiveness:
<< back to the TOC Summary: I have summarized the OG-derived programs Alphabetic Phonics, Barton, Take Flight, and Wilson, elsewhere on this blog. In addition to those, I have located 7 studies of other, mostly "unbranded" Orton-Gillingham approaches. Of these studies, ~60% showed that OG intervention had a statistically significant, positive result in at least one reading measure. Unfortunately, in one study, the OG program Sonday performed worse than the comparison program and the control group on most measures.
Other Orton-Gillingham Approaches: The Research
Many of those who are trained in Orton-Gillingham ( O.G. / “OG” ) approaches do not use a specific curriculum. Rather they use the scope and sequence provided by their particular training (for example ISME OG), or derive their own for a given student. For the purposes of this discussion, I have grouped these studies of “un-branded” or other O.G. approaches together. I address a few of the “branded” Orton-Gillingham derived programs, including Alphabetic Phonics, Barton, Take Flight, and Wilson elsewhere on this blog (see links above).
An early experimental study of an Orton-Gilligham intervention (Litcher & Roberge, 1979) found that after about 500 hours of instruction (3 hours per day for the entire school year), students who were given OG instruction outperformed controls in terms of word analysis, word knowledge, vocabulary, reading, and reading comprehension. The results were considered statistically significant. No effect sizes were calculated, and due to the abbreviated summary of the research available, it was difficult to interpret the results further. Another study, Simpson et al (1992) found that overall, a 1 year OG intervention had a statistically significant impact on incarcerated students’ reading (nearly 1 year growth for the OG treatment, but virtually no growth for the control). However, the researchers noted that the impacts varied widely with time of intervention. Students who received less than 23 hours of instruction made little to no progress, and students who received under 50 hours of instruction did not make statistically significant progress. Only students who received more than 50 hours of intervention made significant progress compared to their peers. The effect size by amount of treatment was moderate. A 1993 study (Westrich-Bond, 1993) of 72 students found that students receiving OG approaches made gains in nonsense word decoding, and also in word identification. I only had access to a partial copy, so was only able to access the statistical significance via a meta-analysis by Ritchey and Goeke, who noted that the result was not statistically significant compared to controls (see Ritchey and Goeke 2006). Another study also had mixed results. A small intervention study carried out over a summer suggested that OG had a slightly weaker effect on phonemic awareness than the auditory training program Fast ForWord, but a statistically significant positive effect on word attack (large effect size) - though this was due to the fact that FFW actually resulted in declines in word attack scores (Hook et al. 2001 - see also this link). A study of 1st Grade students found that compared to a basal reader program, 45 hours of OG intervention had a statistically significant and moderately positive effect on decoding skills: word attack and word identification (Stewart 2011). A 2013 study of 87 struggling readers in grades 1-3 examined the impact of the OG intervention Sonday, as well as the Fast ForWord intervention as compared to a control group. Unfortunately, the group who received Sonday usually performed worse than Fast ForWord and sometimes worse than the control group in reading post-tests, though the differences were not always statiscially significant. After approximately 30 weeks of intervention, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of post-test reading scores on the WIAT early reading subtests (phonics, rhyming, blending, and sight words). Fast ForWord had the highest mean score, Sonday the second highest, and the Control group had the lowest, but the difference was not statistically significant. Students in the Control Group had the highest score on the Reading Comprehension subtest of the WIAT, while the Sonday group had the second highest. The differences were not statistically significant. In terms of ORF, the Control Group had the highest score, Fast ForWord had the second highest, while Sonday was lower. The differences were not statistically significant. On the WIAT word reading and pseudoword reading subtests, the Control Group had the highest score, Fast ForWord had the second highest, and Sonday was lower than these. For these two subtests, the result was statistically significant (Reed 2013).
For further evaluation of Orton-Gillingham programs, see also this extended analysis of OG programs at PedagogyNonGrata, though note that not all the studies there focus on dyslexic or struggling readers.
My takeaway? Orton-Gillingham approaches have a long history and a solid theoretical base, but mixed evidence of effectiveness in practice. It is difficult to draw broad conclusions from studies of these approaches because the specific scope, sequence, and lessons may be wildly different between each of them. With a high enough dosage (45-500 hours), some of the OG interventions seem to be effective at getting results. Others, less so.
It’s a bit of a dice-roll here. If deciding to pursue an OG intervention, I would want to know more about the track-record of the individual tutor or interventionist. Specifically I would ask them how long it typically takes their students to go from square one to mastering all phonics, phonemic awareness, and decoding/word-attack skills and graduate from their tutoring program into independent reading.
Other OG-derived Programs: All About Reading, Alphabetic Phonics, Barton, Logic of English, PAF Reading, SPIRE, Take Flight, Wilson,
Research Studies:
Hook, P. E., Macaruso, P., & Jones, S. (2001). Efficacy of Fast ForWord training on facilitating acquisition of reading skills by children with reading difficulties—A longitudinal study. Annals of Dyslexia, 51, 73-96. Google Scholar
Litcher, J. H., & Roberge, L. P. (1979). First grade intervention for reading achievement of high risk children. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 29, 238-244. Google Scholar
Reed, M. S. (2013). A comparison of computer-based and multisensory interventions on at-risk students' reading achievement. Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Google Scholar
Simpson, S. B., Swanson, J. M., & Kunkel, K. (1992). The impact of an intensive multisensory reading program on a population of learning-disabled delinquents. Annals of Dyslexia, 42, 54-66. Google Scholar
Stewart, E. D. (2011). The impact of systematic multisensory phonics instructional design on the decoding skills of struggling readers. Dissertation. Walden University. Google Scholar
Return to the Know Your Options Table of Contents
This Research Summary is a work in progress.
Leave me a comment if you know of other studies that I could include!
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