8/25/2024

Impact of Lexia® Core5® Reading in Maryland

PURPOSE: The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Act provided additional funding to schools to support the implementation of evidence-based interventions. As part of this initiative, many school districts began implementing Lexia® Core5® Reading to advance students’ reading achievement. This study focused on whether elementary schools in Maryland that used Core5 outperformed schools that did not use Core5 on the English Language Arts (ELA) Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP), the state's annual ELA assessment.

METHOD: In this large-scale, quasi-experimental study, Lexia® researchers compared Maryland schools that used Core5 and those that did not. Analyses included students in grades 3–5. There were 317 Core5 schools and 555 non-Core5 schools in the study. One set of analyses compared all Core5 and non-Core5 schools, and a second set of sensitivity analyses was conducted, which closely matched Core5 schools to non-Core5 schools on 2022 MCAP ELA scores and demographic characteristics. Multiple linear regression models were used to predict the effect of using Core5 on 2023 MCAP ELA scores, controlling for the schools’ 2022 MCAP ELA scores.

KEY FINDINGS:

• More elementary students in Maryland schools that used Core5 scored in the proficient range on the MCAP English Language Arts assessment than students in schools that did not use Core5.
• The positive effects of Core5 were also observed for each individual grades 3–5, though the statistical significance varied across grades.