I’m thrilled to share this research report that shows the impact of the Once program on the achievement of kindergarteners in the first half of this school year.

We are grateful to Dr. Rachel Schechter and her team at LXD Research for their ongoing work on this study. While we conduct a lot of internal measurement, like weekly oral-reading fluency assessments, we also want our outcomes to be measured by third-party, validated assessments (for example, the DIBELS assessment).

There are some clear caveats associated with this preliminary research: the sample sizes are small, it doesn’t yet include control-group information, and it only includes data from the schools that sent us their mid-year assessment scores.  We are working with a separate research team on a randomized controlled trial (ESSA Tier I), and we will share those results as soon as we have them.

Why share this preliminary research now? Recent public discussions about the lack of evidence for even the most storied reading programs show the tremendous risks of delaying research or of delaying the sharing of the results with the public. In the software world, there is a mantra about releasing “early and often” because it leads to better products. In the education world, we believe there should be a similar mantra about releasing research results early and often.