Grounded in over 35 years of rigorous research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Empower™ Reading is designed for older students who struggle with acquiring age-appropriate word identification, decoding, and spelling skills. This program provides systematic phonics instruction and leverages this foundation to develop five core decoding strategies. Instruction not only centers on building the skills of effective reading, but also on developing positive beliefs, attitudes, and self confidence as a learner.
Five Decoding Strategies
The five Empower™ strategies are taught in sequence and are practiced cumulatively over the course of the program. Through explicit, systematic, and direct instruction, students develop mastery of each strategy
Sounding Out: Teaches phonemic awareness, left-to right sequencing, letter sound correspondences (phonics), sound blending, and segmenting.
Rhyming: Teaches word identification by analogy, and teaches students how to use what they know about word patterns to figure out words they don’t know,
Peeling Off: Teaches students to identify, segment, and pronounce common affixes at the beginning (e.g., un-, re-, mis-) and ends of words (e.g., -tion, -ful), thereby reducing the unknown word parts that need to be sounded out.
Vowel Alert: Students are taught alternative vowel pronunciations and how to be flexible when attempting an unfamiliar word. This is particularly helpful for words that use challenging vowel teams like ea as in bead and great.
Spy: Allows students to use their growing world knowledge to recognize small known words or word parts in longer, unknown words. This is particularly helpful when encountering compound words like midday or bookmark.
Metacognition
Throughout the program, students learn a metacognitive organizational structure that helps them to coordinate successful selection, application, monitoring, and evaluation of the Empower™ strategies. This routine, Game Plan, is highly empowering for students who may have previously been guessing at unknown words. Now they have command of the tools to unlock reading.
Fluency
Accuracy and fluency are a particular emphasis in the final half of the program. The rapid recognition of all levels of text, including letter-sound patterns, affixes, individual words, sentences, and stories, are incorporated into the lessons because of their importance in facilitating the development of reading fluency. Students read connected text with every lesson and are coached on how to apply their Empower™ strategies outside of the intervention setting.
Research Base
Panda, E., Woehrle, T., Frijters, J. C., Moules, R., Zolis, S., Edwards, E., Steinbach, K. A., De Palma, M., & Lovett, M. W. (2022, March 23). “Empowering” Schools to Implement Effective Research-Based Reading Remediation Delivers Long-Lasting Improvements to Children’s Reading Trajectories.
Lovett, M.W., Frijters, J.C., Steinbach, K.A., Sevcik, R.A., & Morris, R.D. (2021) Effective intervention for adolescents with reading disabilities: Combining reading and motivational remediation to improve outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 113, No. 4, 656-689.
Lovett, M. W., Frijters, J. C., Wolf, M., Steinbach, K. A., Sevcik, R. A., & Morris, R. D. (2017). Early intervention for children at risk for reading disabilities: The impact of grade at intervention and individual differences on intervention outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(7), 889–914.
Lovett, Maureen & Lacerenza, L. & Steinbach, K.A. & Palma, M.. (2014). Empower (TM) Reading: Development and roll-out of a research-based intervention program for children with reading disabilities. Perspectives on Language and Literacy. 40. 21-31. Baltimore, MD: International Dyslexia Association.
Morris R.D., Lovett M.W., Wolf M., Sevcik R.A., Steinbach K.A., Frijters J.C., & Shapiro M.B.. Multiple-component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities. 2012 Mar-Apr; 45(2):99-127.
To learn more about the research, team, and history behind Empower™️ Reading, visit https://www.sickkids.ca/en/learning/empower-reading/.