Effectiveness Studies

During 2006-2009, the Tiered Intervention programme effectiveness team has conducted regular assessment to 3 support schools and a control school, to examine students’ learning progress and evaluate the curriculum effectiveness. To ensure that the evaluation results will not be affected, the students of the support and control groups are all similar in terms of age, intelligence and socio-economic background.

The assessment consisted of two parts: ‘language proficiency’ and ‘linguistic and cognitive abilities’. The effectiveness team calculated students’ rate of improvement based on their performance in multiple assessment, and compare the rates between students of the support and control groups. In general, the analysis of the assessment results over three school years reflected that,

• Students of the support schools showed continuous and salient improvement in many assessment domains, especially in pronunciation, dictation, reading comprehension, reading fluency, simple writing, Chinese character structure, morpheme awareness and grammar. For example, the rates of improvement in pronunciation and dictation of students in the support groups were higher than those in the control groups by 8% and 9% respectively.
• Students’ performance in the standard language assessments also reflected the effectiveness of the intervention programme. The assessment results of the primary two and primary three students showed that, the number of students in support schools who met the normal standard in the language assessments increased by 24% after receiving Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention. In contrast, that in the control groups slightly decreased.
• Students who received Tier 3 intervention have dyslexic problems and had been lagging behind (in terms of academic performance and rate of improvement) in their primary one and primary two study. However, after receiving Tier 3 individualized intervention, these students showed ideal academic improvement.

In short, the research results proved that the tiered intervention programme has enhanced students’ language proficiency as well as linguistic and cognitive abilities with continuous and remarkable improvement. In addition, by comparing students in the support and control groups of Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention, it was concluded that the tiered intervention programme could help students who have specific learning difficulties in enhancing their Chinese language proficiency and performance.

During the 2009/10 and 2010/11 school years, the Education Bureau and the research team of ‘READ & WRITE: A Jockey Club Learning Support Network’ project from the University of Hong Kong had implemented the three-tiered intervention support model in 35 local primary schools to support dyslexic students. From 2011, the Education Bureau has implemented the model in more primary schools.