What is Failure Free Reading Online?

Failure Free Reading is a research-proven, language development and reading comprehension program founded in 1988. It has been implemented in 1000’s of schools across the United States with 10’s of 1000’s of students.

The program has a remarkable 85% or higher success rate with lowest literacy readers. The program’s primary goal is to give lowest literacy readers the immediate opportunity to improve their vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. The program targets and is most effectively used with at-risk, ESL, special education and other students in the lowest 20% of the reading population – especially those identified by Torgesen (2000) as “treatment resisters” – those who do not respond to traditional remedial techniques.

Failure Free Reading presents age appropriate materials within a multi-sensory format using practices based on direct instruction and meta-cognitive strategies. More importantly, Failure Free Reading has created instructional materials which incorporate the principles of cumulative learning (McCormick, 1994), and stress the therapeutic necessity of (1.) repetition within multiple instructional contexts (Gates, 1930, Hargis et. al., 1992, McCormick, 1994), (2.) control for syntax and semantics (Harber, 1979, Wigg and Semel,1980), and (3.) providing immediate performance feedback (National Reading Panel).

Students enter the program at their grade level, but diagnostic testing is used to place them at their appropriate challenge level – an appropriate prescription provided by the program’s Diagnostic Prescriptive talking software. A unique feature of the corresponding talking software is that it is “reading neutral” – students do not have to know how to read in order to learn critical words and passages. Every item on the screen is read aloud to the students. This allows nonreaders and beginning readers to engage with age appropriate material – often for the very first time.

Failure Free Reading has been implemented in many different settings across the country and evaluated on several different assessment instruments. There is documentation for over 75 studies with over 6000 students from numerous locations and conducted by multiple investigators using several different assessment instruments. The table below provides a summary of various studies that have been conducted.

The listing below provides a summary of some of the instruments that have been used to assess student reading growth through Failure Free Reading.

The data have been collected and the studies have been conducted by university researchers, district evaluators, school personnel, independent evaluators, and internally. Throughout all of the evaluations, Failure Free Reading has demonstrated success in accelerating the learning curve of the lowest literacy students.

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