“Raffi and his Friends” is a peer-assisted strategy delivered as a whole-class program that consists of 20 structured lessons in which the instructors use the strategies of clarifying, questioning, and predicting to support student reading comprehension. Student dyads are created by matching students with high and low reading skills in order to allow them to work in heterogeneous groups.
A recent evaluation published in Contemporary Educational Psychology assessed the effectiveness of this program in third grade in Germany. The study matched 11 classes (187 students) in the experimental group with 10 classes (177 students) in the control group. The study used independent measures of fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension to assess the effectiveness of the program. The intervention was delivered by research assistants supervised by the development team, thus results could differ in the program implementation with regular teachers.
