Effects of individual direct-instruction tutoring on foster children’s academic skills: A randomized trial

We conducted a randomized effectiveness trial to test the hypothesis that foster children of primary-school age who were exposed to an individualized direct-instruction tutoring intervention delivered by their foster parents would experience significantly greater pre-test to post-test gains in reading and math than would foster children in a wait-list control group. The sample consisted of 77 foster children in 9 local Children's Aid Societies in Ontario, Canada. At the pre-test, the foster children were aged 6 to 13years (M=10.7years, SD=1.6) and were in primary-school grades 2 through 7. Forty-two foster children were randomly assigned to the experimental (tutoring) group and 35 to the wait-list control group. The sub-tests of the Wide Range Achievement Test—Fourth edition (WRAT4; Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006) served as the outcome measures. At the post-test, the foster children in the experimental group had made statistically and practically greater gains than those in the control group on the WRAT4 sub-tests of Sentence Comprehension (Hedges' g=0.38, p<.05), Reading Composite (g=0.29, p<.10), and Math Computation (g=0.46, p<.01) but not on Word Reading (g=0.19, ns) or Spelling (g=−0.08, ns). The implications of the results for improving foster children's educational achievement were discussed.