Special Education team tackles afterschool tutoring

Monday, February 09, 2009 -

 Bayview International Center for Education and Art
 

Many schoolchildren who have learning disabilities or limited English proficiency receive some form of tutoring after school, but some educators question the effectiveness of these programs.

Afterschool tutoring programs, many of which are staffed with poorly trained volunteers, often show no clear impact on students’ skills.

“It seems like such wasted opportunity for these tutoring sessions to be so hit-or-miss,” said Kimber Malmgren, UW-Madison associate professor of special education.

So Malmgren designed the Reading Intervention Project for Struggling Readers in After-school Settings, a program centered on evidence-based reading instructional practices that have been validated by research with learners with disabilities and English Language Learners.

“I tried to come up with a tutoring program that (other) afterschool programs could adopt for their own use,” she said. “In order for this to happen, the practice had to be easy for volunteer tutors to learn how to implement – and be inexpensive.”  

The program began in Spring 2007 at Bayview International Center for Education and Art in Madison’s Triangle Neighborhood at the intersection of Park and W. Washington streets.

Malmgren’s team of graduate students and students from UW’s Undergraduate Research Scholars program provide supplemental reading instruction to elementary schoolchildren who attend Bayview’s afterschool program. The doctoral students also conduct reading assessments and monitor progress.

In order to measure the program’s effectiveness, Malmgren included a form of progress monitoring that allows both the tutors and the kids to see if the program was working, she said.  

The reading program provides individualized instruction to community youth whose reading skills are lagging significantly and who do not have access to reading tutoring through any other program.

Participating students are exposed to the intervention three days a week for 24 sessions.

“The parents were so happy that someone was working with their kids,” Malmgren said.

The reading intervention comprises vocabulary instruction, adult modeling, repeated reading, and corrective feedback methods. Participating students receive the intervention primarily through one-on-one instruction from project staff.

“The tutors have to be quick and highly motivated,” she said, explaining that they need to be flexible with their strategies, even within a single session, and adjust to the child’s needs and attention spans.

“It has to feel like a game,” Malmgren said, explaining that staff must compete for children’s attention when they are tired or want to participate in the fun activities that other children are doing.

“My research with the afterschool programs has been an ongoing process where I have tweaked the intervention to increase both the effectiveness and ease of use for the tutors,” she said.

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