Reading Recovery is a research-based intervention with the prime goals of accelerating literacy learning and reducing reading and writing failure difficulties by targeting those students performing in the lowest 20% of Year One.
It was developed in New Zealand by educator and psychologist Dame Marie Clay. Clay used evidenced from her intensive research and observation of good classroom practice to develop Reading Recovery.
Reading Recovery was developed and trialled in New Zealand in the early 1980s. By 1988 it had reached national coverage in New Zealand and had expanded not just to Australia. It has also been adopted as an effective literacy intervention in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Bermuda and Denmark.