A new study has found evidence of big gains in students’ reading ability from using one specific phonics program—and suggests that consistent implementation is key to getting the strongest results.
The foundational-skills curriculum, UFLI Foundations, was created by researchers at the University of Florida Literacy Institute. When kindergarten and 1st grade teachers in one Florida district used the program for a year, their students grew at a much faster rate than similar students in other classrooms in the district that continued business-as-usual reading instruction.
Teachers who followed the program more closely saw better results than those who didn’t teach lessons in the recommended sequence, or with all of the listed steps.
The results are “dramatic,” said Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University, who was not involved with the study. Gains from UFLI are equivalent to 8 months of additional instruction for kindergarteners, and almost a year-and-a-half of extra instruction for 1st graders, he said.
“In reading studies these days, these kinds of findings are rare,” Kearns said.
Decades of research have shown that phonics instruction—teaching children how letters represent sounds, and how to blend those sounds together to make words—is the most effective way to get beginning readers to start decoding words. But on average, effect sizes in this research are moderate. Some programs work better than others. And that’s led to confusion about how much phonics to teach, and for how long.
As the “science of reading” movement has spread, at least 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation or enacted policies requiring that schools use evidence-based approaches to teaching students how to read. This almost always includes a mandate for systematic, explicit phonics instruction. Some states have issued lists of approved programs. In this landscape, identifying what works—and why—has taken on a new urgency.
UFLI Foundations has many similarities to other programs that aim to teach the building blocks of reading, said Holly Lane, the director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute, and the lead author on the study. Lane is one of the developers of the curriculum.
The program explicitly teaches letter sounds, how they correspond to print, and how to blend letters together into words. But Lane thinks the opportunity for a lot of practice—applying these skills in different contexts, again and again—sets UFLI apart.
“When we’re introducing the new concept, we’re still practicing that last one,” Lane said. “And that goes on for weeks and weeks.”
How the UFLI program works
Lane and her colleagues tested the program with more than 2,700 students in Florida schools during the 2021-22 school year.
Students in the control classrooms received the district’s regular reading instruction, in which teachers used a core instructional program designed to address all areas of reading. In the treatment classrooms, teachers still used this core program, but used UFLI Foundations for foundational-skills lessons. The UFLI program was taught for 30 minutes daily.
Each lesson is built around activities designed to cement students’ letter-sound knowledge and apply that knowledge to reading. For example, students are presented with letters and asked to identify the sounds those letters make, they listen to letter sounds and write the letters those sounds represent, and then they read individual words and passages that use those letter-sound correspondences.
Phonics patterns are introduced in a systematic sequence, and students get opportunities to practice the patterns they’ve learned previously as new ones are introduced.
Using statistical models, the researchers compared kids who received UFLI to kids who didn’t, but shared similar demographic characteristics. The kindergartners and 1st graders who completed the UFLI lessons scored higher on DIBELS, an assessment of word-reading ability and oral-reading fluency.
Teachers using the program were also observed, to evaluate how closely they followed its scope and sequence. In classrooms where teachers adhered tightly to the plan—completing each step of each lesson, using the recommended materials, and doing lessons each day—students made more progress.
“Some teachers just out and out refused to do it, or would do it sporadically or inconsistently,” said Lane. “And others were right off the bat bought in and implemented it as designed, and that made a difference.”
Can a structured program simplify teaching?
Implementation has been a consistent challenge for school districts as they shift to new methods of reading instruction.
Teachers have voiced concerns that they aren’t getting enough guidance about how to put new approaches into practice, or that they don’t have the instructional materials—for instance, decodable books—they need to do so.
UFLI is designed in a way that lowers some of those barriers, said Kearns. It has a clear scope and sequence and comes with activities, assessments, and online tools that are aligned to the curriculum.
But it’s not the only curriculum that could lead to student success, he added. One big takeaway from this study is more general, he said—that it’s important for teachers to have a research-tested model to work from.
“Get a program” with some evidence behind it, he said. Relying on teachers to create hands-on manipulatives or design all their own activities isn’t sustainable, he said.
“It’s so hard these days to do anything well, all the demands on people’s time, that adding to their burden by saying to them, ‘Make a bunch of stuff,’ is just totally overwhelming,” said Kearns.
Having materials to work from gives teachers some breathing room, he said. “Instead of figuring out what you’re going to teach, you have time to figure out how you’re going to teach it.”
