Applying Cost-Benefit Analysis to Inform the Selection of Academic Interventions

• Author / Creator

  Antoniuk, Andrea

• More than 40% of working-age Canadians live with low literacy skills. Furthermore, there is no foreseeable decline in this striking percentage, with nearly 20% of Canadians ages 16-19 demonstrating low literacy skills. To address this literacy deficit, numerous interventions are available that address the fundamental building blocks of literacy. Interventions often vary in terms of costs (i.e., materials, training for teachers, time), and choosing the most effective interventions from the abundance of options can be a difficult algorithm to navigate. Further, choosing cost-effective interventions can benefit students while efficiently using limited resource funds. My aims in the present study were to develop a novel process for analyzing the cost-benefit of academic interventions, and to apply this process to fluency (i.e., word reading speed) interventions. The cost-benefit process compares interventions by studying the effect size benefit per unit of cost. In applying this process to fluency interventions, I reviewed 614 publications, and was able to successfully compare two interventions (i.e., QuickReads, Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies; HELPS). The HELPS intervention was seven times more cost-effective than QuickReads, which suggests that HELPS may increase fluency (i.e., word reading speed) gains more quickly and use fewer resources than QuickReads. The cost-benefit methodology developed in the present study provided useful comparisons and is potentially adaptable for other academic interventions.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • academic interventions
  • reading interventions
  • cost-benefit
  • Early Years
  • fluency

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Education

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-pfwz-ar74

• License

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