Tier 1 “ Strong ” Standards
A2i Meets Evidence
A2i is backed by more than two decades of rigorous research from researchers at the Florida Center for Reading Research and the University of California, Irvine.
Evidence for ESSA and the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) , two of the nation’s watchdogs for effective educational research, have completed positive reviews of the evidence supporting A2i’s impact on student outcomes: • Evidence for ESSA reviewed three randomized controlled research studies. It concluded that the A2i system meets the highest level—Tier 1 “strong” evidence—of efficacy in improving student reading achievement for Grades K–3, as outlined by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which governs the United States’ K–12 public education policy. According to Evidence for ESSA, the overall effect size for the three research studies reviewed was +0.23, representing a large effect. These effect sizes report the statistical magnitude of a program’s impact. The rule of thumb in PreK–12 education research is that an effect size of 0.05 is Small, 0.05 to less than 0.20 is Medium, and 0.20 or greater is Large (Kraft 2020). • The WWC reviewed two randomized controlled research studies for students spanning Grades 1–3 and found that A2i meets Tier 1 evidence “without reservations” and had statistically significant positive effects on literacy outcomes. The first study focused on 396 students in first grade and concluded that the use of A2i improved students’ letter and word reading skills. The second study was longitudinal, following students from first through third grades (n = 1,573), and reported statistically significant positive effects caused by A2i on both alphabetic and comprehension outcomes.
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