© 2025 Vista Higher Learning Vista’s Bridges: A Study of Reading Growth in MLs 2 OVERVIEW SEG Measurement conducted a study of the effectiveness of Vista’s Bridges to Literature and Content for improving the reading skills of middle school multilingual (ML) students. We found that ML students receiving instruction incorporating Bridges achieved significantly greater growth in reading skills than a comparable group of students receiving traditional instruction (“business as usual”). The first part of this document describes the intervention, the design of the study, research questions addressed, and the data collection methods. The second part of the document presents the sampling procedures and results of the analyses conducted to answer the research questions. For the first question, we examined the growth in reading skills achieved by ML students who received instruction using Bridges (treatment group) from the beginning to the end of the school year. For the second question, we compared the growth achieved by the treatment group receiving instruction incorporating Bridges to a comparable group of ML students (control group) receiving traditional instruction not including Bridges. The third question compared the treatment and control groups with respect to sex, race, and economic status, to determine if Bridges was particularly effective for any specific group. A summary and conclusions are presented in the final section of the document. UNDERSTANDING THE LEARNERS Research has established that children who have difficulty reading at the end of first grade rarely catch up by the end of elementary school (Torgesen, 2004; Francis et al., 1996; Juel, 1988; Shaywitz et al., 1999; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). Digging deeper, findings reveal that when students do not master foundational skills early on (by third grade), there is a long-term negative impact on their reading ability and overall academic success. Early intervention is a research-proven effective measure for reducing—and sometimes altogether preventing—reading disabilities for students at risk of reading failure (Connor et al., 2014; Gersten et al., 2008). Acquiring reading skills can be particularly challenging for students for whom English is not their first language. One out of every ten students is classified as ML at some point during their K-12 schooling (U.S. Department of Education (DOE), 2018). Research has shown not only that ML status is associated with lower academic expectations from teachers and the students themselves (Kanno & Kangas, 2014), but that it also corresponds to a lower likelihood of taking general and advanced courses in core subjects (Estrada, 2014; Umansky, 2016a, 2018). This contributes to lower academic achievement (Umansky, 2016b). In terms of academic growth, Soland and Sandilos (2020) found that students classified as English language learners (ELLs) at any point in their academic career have lower achievement than their non-ELL peers.
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