Research on UFLI

UFLI

Good Evidence of Relative Effectiveness

<< back to the TOC Summary: UFLI is a very new phonics program. So far I have reviewed 1 study of the full program and one pilot study of a partial version of it. Of these, 100% had at least one measure where UFLI had a statistically significant positive result compared to controls. However, the largest study had some significant study design issues.

Keep in mind that unlike the other phonics programs I have reviewed, UFLI was designed for whole classroom use, not as intervention.

I have now located a few more studies of UFLI, and hope to review them soon.

UFLI Foundations Research

UFLI is a new program. I wouldn’t normally review a program designed for classroom use and not designed for intervention, but due to the substantial recent buzz around the program, I am including a discussion of it here.

UFLI Foundations is a recently developed program based on the Orton-Gillingham method, but incorporating some of the articulation emphasis of LiPS as well as some emphasis on word chaining, and a de-emphasis on some of the “phonics rules” ala Linguistic Phonics programs such as Reading Simplified. It is a lengthy program designed for whole classroom use. The program consists of 148 one-hour lessons (usually split into 30 minute teaching increments). The scope and sequence takes 2-3 years to complete.

UFLI Foundations has had one quasi-experimental study carried out to determine its effectiveness. The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but was carried out by an independent researcher. (“Peer-reviewed” basically means that other education researchers from competing universities/businesses have fact-checked the study).

Gage 2023 compared 1,670 students in grades K-1 who received UFLI in 2021/2022 to a demographically matched control group who did not receive it in the previous 2020/2021 school year. Both groups of students had performed below-average on a DIBELS pre-test. The study found that students who received UFLI had significantly higher post-test DIBELS composite scores than students from the previous year who had not received UFLI. The effect size was large. The total instructional time, if carried out to fidelity, was approximately 90 instructional hours, at 30 min/day, but teachers varied in terms of the hours they actually taught. The study has promising results, albeit with some caveats. While the study was large, it was not randomized, and studies with control groups from different time periods run the risk of comparing apples to oranges. This is somewhat problematic, and might be particularly so in the years studied because the control group may have been impacted by the COVID school closures, which could lead to lower post-test reading scores for the control group, and therefore artificially inflate gains observed in the experimental year. Declines in reading scores were seen nation-wide during the 2020-2021 school year (see Kuhman et al. 2022, and 2023, and Domingue et al. 2021), so it seems highly possible that the study was affected by this. Long story short, the real effects of UFLI might not be as large as this particular study indicates. Subsequent studies will help resolve this.

While UFLI has not been studied as an intervention, an earlier version of the program was piloted as such in a small 3-week summer study. Though not the full UFLI program, it showed promise, with students who received the 1:1 intervention scoring significantly higher than controls on two measures: Consonant Blends with Short Vowels and R-Controlled Vowels. Effect sizes were considered moderate. (Contesse et al. 2021). 

My Takeaway? The UFLI foundational skills program has a solid theoretical basis and promising results in a single large study and one smaller study. The effect size in the larger study was substantial and significant. This is a good sign. However, as the control group may have been impacted by the COVID-19 school closures, and the results haven't, to my knowledge, been peer-reviewed, the results must be interpreted with some caution. The program is not currently designed for intervention, and delivery of the full program requires upwards of 140 instructional hours. While the program has a lot of positive buzz around it, and some promising evidence of effectiveness at producing gains in reading, it is not incredibly efficient, time-wise, at getting kids from point A to point B, and therefore would not be my first choice, especially for intervention.

Research Studies:

Contesse, V. A., Campese, T., Kaplan, R., Mullen, D. A., Pico, D. L., Gage, N. A., & Lane, H. B. (2021). The effects of an intensive summer literacy intervention on reader development. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 37(3), 221-239. Google Scholar

Gage, N. (2023). Districtwide Pilot Study of UFLI Foundations. UFLI | WestEd

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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!