The efficacy of a professional school counselor’s literacy-related social skills interventions in the acquisition of reading comprehension by emergent readers

The current study used a mixed design ANOVA to compare the I-Ready reading comprehension scores of 76 students enrolled in an elementary school in South Texas. A previously untested intervention, a literacy-related social skills group, derived from the constructs of emotional intelligence, was compared to the more orthodox interventions of a social book club and a traditional classroom setting over three assessment windows throughout the academic school year. Participants included 40 girls and 36 boys. All groups had an equal division of girls and boys, and an equal division of students from third through fifth grade. Each group met for 50 minutes per week, and groups contained no more than 5 participants. Therefore, each treatment condition was given to multiple groups. The participants were 86.8% Latino (n = 66), 7.9% White (n = 6), 3.9% African American (n = 3), and 1.3% Asian (n = 1). Many of the participants, 76.3% (n = 58), were from homes of low socioeconomic status. More than one in ten of the students, 11.8% (n = 9), were also in the process of learning English as a second language. The demographic attributes of the participants in the current study mirror the overall demographics of the school. After treatments, the end of year (EOY) scores indicated a significant difference between groups with F = 10.05, p ≤ .001. The effect size of η2 was .216 indicating a large effect. The results of the study demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in reading comprehension I-Ready scores in the interaction effect of participants in the literacy-related social skills group at the end of the school year while no statistically significant gains were made in the other two groups (F (4,146) = 12.57, p ≤ .001, η2 = .256.)