Read Stop Write

Research Alignment

The evidence-based instructional practices included in Read STOP Write were derived from experimental and quasi-experimental studies of instruction on students’ reading achievement in upper-elementary and middle grades. In 2022, the Institute of Education Sciences released a What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide titled Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9 (Vaughn et al., 2022). This practice guide includes four recommendations:

• 1. Build students’ decoding skills so they can read complex multisyllabic words.
• 2. Provide purposeful fluency-building activities to help students read effortlessly.
• 3. Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text.
• a. Build students’ world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text.
• b. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read.
• c. Teach students a routine for determining the gist of a short section of text.
• d. Teach students to monitor comprehension as they read.
• 4. Provide students with opportunities to practice making sense of stretch text (i.e., challenging text) that will expose them to complex ideas and information.

In Read STOP Write, teachers build students’ multisyllabic decoding skills by teaching the strategy for breaking apart long words in response to complex words during reading.

Read STOP Write also includes repeated reading that makes use of the following fluency-building activities: choral reading (teacher and students reading aloud together), partner reading (student pairs taking turns reading the text sentence by sentence), and whisper reading (students reading the text independently in a quiet voice).

Each day of a Read STOP Write lesson includes comprehension-building practices. Students are prompted to activate prior knowledge before reading and build word knowledge using strategies for learning vocabulary during reading. They also learn to monitor comprehension and determine the gist by highlighting the main idea and underlining supporting details and combining them in a summary sentence during and after reading. Students ask and answer guiding questions about text structure to better understand the text after a subsequent reading and communicate their understanding using text structure to plan and write after reading the text.

Finally, one of the strengths of Read STOP Write is that the major instructional goals (multisyllabic decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) are not taught in isolation. Rather, students learn to build these skills in the context of authentic reading of stretch text that exposes them to complex science and social studies content.

Research Publications

Read more about the research and development for Read STOP Write: