Reading Recovery is an intensive, first-grade, one-to-one tutoring program (Pinnell, 1989) developed in New Zealand by Marie Clay. In Reading Recovery, first grade students who are having difficulties learning to read spend a half hour per day for up to 16 weeks with a highly trained reading specialist. The time is spent reading several books with known difficulty levels, and in writing activities. Two assumptions of Reading Recovery are that students who are having difficulty learning to read can be taught to read in 12-16 weeks, and that once they have learned a set of reading skills, the students can progress for several years without needing further remedial assistance. Members of Ohio State University's Reading Recovery team are now working with a University of Chicago team on a grade and/or schoolwide version of Reading Recovery.
The Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC) offers one of the more widely implemented integrated computer-assisted-instruction (CAI) packages. In CCC, students spend 12-25 minutes each day in interactive, computer-driven instruction. A file server records each students pattern of answers, and selects new activities for each child for the following day. The particular commercial program was chosen not as a commercial endorsement, but because it has a longer and more often independently documented evaluation history. "Release 14" of CCC was studied in Special Strategies. The summer 1995 release was "Release 16."
Most commercially developed computer-assisted instruction products such as CCC, Jostens, and Write to Read can be offered to all students or targeted to compensatory education students only; most can be offered in a separate laboratory or in classrooms. In Special Strategies, one school used CCC for all students and one for compensatory education only. Each used a separate computer laboratory.
