In a primary school classroom, a nine-year old reads aloud to the person next to them. When they stumble over a word, their partner encourages them to try again. Together they discuss what might happen next. But the child isn’t reading to an adult – a teaching assistant or volunteer. Instead, they are reading to a peer in their class. Later they’ll switch jobs, and help their partner out as they read.
What’s more, both children have been taught skills to help them support each other on their journey learning to read. This reading approach is called Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (Pals) developed at Vanderbilt University in the US. It builds on children’s relationships with each other to make learning to read a team endeavour.
The programme now has international reach. We
have spent a number of years testing and adapting PALS for use by schools in the UK.
Pupils within a class are paired together, using pupil reading data that shows their current reading level. The aim of the pairing is for there to be a bit of a difference in reading ability between the pupils in the pair. Each pair of children selects the book they want to read, giving them autonomy over their reading material. Pupils benefit from taking turns to coach and read. The children receive support from their partner throughout the session, with their teacher monitoring the interactions in the class.
Pals-UK is a 20-week programme and is delivered three times a week for 35 minutes a session. In the first four weeks, pupils receive training from their teacher to practise the programme’s four activities and the roles of coach and reader.
These four activities are partner reading, where pupils read aloud and receive correction support from their partner; retell, where pupils recap the story just read; paragraph shrinking, where pupils summarise a paragraph; and prediction relay, where pupils predict what is going to happen in the next half page of the story.
Our recent research, carried out in more than 100 English primary schools, has shown that this approach improves reading attainment. An evaluation led by Manchester Metropolitan University and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation examined the success of the programme. It concluded that pupils who received Pals-UK gained, on average, two months’ additional progress in reading compared to pupils in schools not participating in the programme. It also highlighted the low cost of the approach. With Pals-UK pupils receiving extensive practise with both fluency and comprehension.
This study not only showed that this specific approach works, but also highlighted more broadly the value of combining clear instructions and lots of support and practice for both reading fluency and use of comprehension strategies. Teachers praised the structured nature of the programme, the resources and support.
However, our study found that in both the schools carrying out the Pals-UK programme and the control schools which did not, children’s motivation to read declined. This reflects other research that has found children’s motivation to read declining as they progress through school.
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On the other hand, 55% of teachers reported that the programme had enhanced a culture of reading for enjoyment. Pupils were engaging in informal book talk with their friends. And children particularly enjoyed trying to summarise paragraphs in as few words as they could, treating it as a fun challenge.
Adapting the approach
We made some changes to the US programme. Reading programmes like this cannot be assumed to translate from one school, one area or country successfully without consideration of the local society, culture and policy landscape .
The US version has an integrated competitive, points-based motivational framework. We removed this for the UK following feedback from pupils and teachers, as it did not align to UK classroom practices. Instead, teachers and pupils wanted to use verbal praise to motivate. We also created video resources and extended training to support teachers’ knowledge about the evidence the programme is based on, as well as the practicalities of using the approach in their classrooms.
We developed guidance to help teachers to use the shared experience of reading, a range of diverse texts and book choice to help pupils to develop a personal interest in engaging with reading.
The success of Pals-UK could not have been achieved without the feedback and input received from teachers throughout the trialling process. This crucial evidence helped us to understand what adaptations and support was necessary to make the programme work for them, as well as their pupils. This enabled us to adapt the programme for UK schools without losing the benefits of the research-informed elements.
We are now planning a new, even larger trial of Pals-UK. In this trial we are aiming to understand how the scheme works at scale.
