Description:
With the Carbo Reading Styles Curriculum and training, teachers learn to identify and attend to the individual Learning Styles of each student. Students in turn have increased opportunities to become engaged with the act of reading such that it becomes an enjoyable part of their lives, enhancing learning in all areas. The Carbo Reading Styles Program (CRSP) is intended to assist students in attaining fluency in a way that allows them to make progress without becoming inhibited by the task of decoding (http://www.nrsi.com/nrsi.htm).

CRSP is considered a research-based reading program by the U.S. Department of Education,National Staff Development Council, NEA, Education Commission of the States, and the Milken Foundation. (http://www.nrsi.com/nrsi.htm).

Goal:
Helping educators make learning to read easy and joyful for all students by accomodating their natural strengths. Student performance results in reading may improve 20% or greater over 2-3 years of Implementation (http://www.nrsi.com/nrsi.htm).

Approach:
The program begins with a web-based Reading Styles Inventory (RSI), which helps teachers identify each individual student's reading styles, where they excel and where they have difficulties. Teachers are trained on and off site on a number of different strategies for reading instruction, grouping and addressing student needs. They will learn how to utilize the Carbo Recorded-Book Method, which feature a series called Power Reading. Dr. Carbo and Bob Cole have developed short reproducible stories accompanied by questions, games and activites geared toward meeting state standards. Students work in 30 minute blocks of time on different aspects of thematic units that integrate reading and writing such as text reading, related projects, phonics/skill building, free individual reading, and small group work (www.nrsi.com).

The principal, a Reading Styles facilitator, and two Reading Styles teachers from different grade levels make up each school's Reading Skills Building Team that become the leaders in modeling CRSP for the rest of the school. This team works together throughout the year(www.nrsi.com).

Parents are also provided with information about their child's reading style and how to help ensure success with CRSP(www.nrsi.com).

Research:
A number of different studies about CRSP have been conducted over the past two decades. Overall school in which CRSP has been implemented showes statistically significant gains in scores on various tests of reading skills. In one study comparing two groups of disabled students from similar schools, the CRSP school outperformed the control group (www.nwrel.org).

One example of Carbo's favorable research findings can be found in Phi Delta Kappa's 1998 publication of a two-year study of the Carbo Reading Styles Program which involved 561 students in grades 1-6 from six school districts (Barber, Carbo & Thomasson). The study compared the effectiveness of many different reading programs to the Carbo Program and found that, when implemented at the 85% level or higher, the Carbo Program is significantly more effective than extant programs. In this carefully controlled quasi-experimental study, both experimental and control teachers and students were matched. Districts used their own standardized achievement tests to measure reading results. Specifically, the findings indicated that, after two years of implementation, students of the Carbo trained teachers achieved higher effect sizes on the reading subtests measured, six times more frequently than did the students of the control teachers (http://www.nrsi.com/nrsi.htm).

Bibliographies of theoretical background and supportive publications are provided along with a narrative of scientific research on the program and articles by Marie Carbo at http://www.nrsi.com/nrsi.htm.

Costs:
Full implementation of the program typically lasts three years. It is recommended that you contact the program office for more information about costs, but in 2002 the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory estimated that the first year will cost between $45-65,000 and each of the following two between $35-50,000 (www.nwrel.org).