Take Flight
Mixed Evidence of Relative Effectiveness:
Summary: Take Flight has been studied a few times, as has its predecessor - Alphabetic Phonics. Because AP is quite different than TF, I have reviewed it on its own page. So far I have reviewed 3 studies of Take Flight. One (33%) had statistically significant positive results, one had positive results but problems with the study design and implementation, and in one study (33%), the intervention performed worse than a comparison program.
Take Flight Research
Take Flight is a 2 year phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension program designed on OG principles and based off of earlier programs such as Alphabetic Phonics (discussed on its own page). It is designed to be implemented by highly trained Certified Academic Language Therapists (CALTs), a certification that requires hundreds of hours of training and hundreds more hours of practicum.
There have only been a few studies of Take Flight which included control groups.
Oakland et al 1998 studied a closely related program, the 350-hour “Dyslexia Training Program” DTP. This program was derived from Alphabetic Phonics, and was in many ways a precursor to Take Flight. In this study of 48 students, 2-year DTP interventions had statistically significant impacts on word recognition, multi-syllable word decoding, and reading comprehension compared to business-as-usual controls. Neither the DTP or Control group improved in spelling. Effect sizes were not calculated, but the researchers labelled them "modest... given the intensity and duration of the intervention." Students’ word recognition levels were still below average after 2 years of intervention. Ring et al 2017 studied a group of 12 students before and after a minimum of 280 hours of Take Flight or adapted DTP intervention with a CALT. The study showed strong effects on comprehension but moderate to weak effects on decoding, word reading, and fluency. Unfortunately, the significance and reliability of these results is complicated by the fact there were problems with the study design, as the intervention group had higher reading skills to begin with. As a result, these findings must be interpreted with caution (see PedagogyNonGrata for further discussion). Another study by Rauch et al (2017) compared Take Flight to a district-designed program which combined Rite Flight, SIPPS, and LLI. After an average of 60 weeks of Take Flight, or 55 weeks of the district-designed program, there was no statistically significant difference in student reading outcomes between the two approaches, and neither was able to get students’ reading scores up to those of the general population on standardized tests, but the district-designed program performed somewhat better than Take Flight (see also this link).
The Take Flight program has a brochure on its website which describes data that it has collected over the years, including follow-up data with 22 children which shows reading comprehension and word recognition scores in the average range 4 years after intervention. It also shows Pre-test / Post-test scores indicating growth following intervention, though word efficiency and oral reading fluency were still below average. Unfortunately, there were no control groups in this study, so although the data is promising, we can’t definitively attribute the effects to the Take Flight program, in the same way that we could not attribute changes in children's height during the study period as an effect of the program.
My takeaway? Take Flight has a solid theoretical base, and is often administered by highly trained professionals (Certified Academic Language Therapists - CALTs) who have spent hundreds of hours tutoring struggling students under the guidance of a mentor. CALTs will have seen a lot, and will have a lot of experience. That’s worth a great deal. It's also worth noting that, like Wilson, Take Flight goes beyond just phonics and includes instruction for vocabulary and reading comprehension. That said, the Take Flight program itself seems to get fairly muted results, even after 280-350 hours of intervention. In one case, it didn't even perform as well as a district-designed program. This is one of the most time-intensive interventions I’ve ever seen. I suspect you could do a fair bit better with a CALT using a different program.
Similar Programs: Alphabetic Phonics
Research Studies:
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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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