Technology-based interventions have been used to improve reading skills for students with reading difficulties. Thus, many literature reviews and meta-analyses have investigated the effectiveness of this type of intervention; however, constant changes in the technology field make it important to review the most recent studies and how these studies were implemented to improve reading skills for students who performed below their peers. This literature review synthesizes the most recent published studies on technology-based interventions for children with reading difficulties. Forty-five research-based studies published from 2010 to 2020 were reviewed and synthesized. The studies were categorized by the five reading skills as reported by the National Reading Panel (National Reading Panel, Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Washington, DC, 2000). Descriptions of the studies' characteristics and interventions as well as an analytical review were provided. The majority of technology-based interventions targeted fluency skills and used computer programs, while vocabulary skills and tablet-based interventions were the least-targeted skills and tools. Most of the studies introduced intervention as independent practice, then as small groups, and then as one-to-one interventions.

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We did not find a functional relation between the intervention and student reading performance.

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) have difficulty with most reading skills, including reading comprehension (Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Improving reading comprehension skills requires efficient interventions that consider both meaning-and code-based skills simultaneously. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across participants, with alternating treatment design, this study compared two reading interventions (repeated reading vs. tablet text-to-speech) combined with a meta-cognitive strategy (question generation). Three fourth-grade and third-grade students who had been diagnosed by their school as having reading difficulties (reading one to two grades behind their expected reading levels) participated in the study. Using the index of narrative complexity (Labov, 1973; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008) as a major dependent variable, two participants showed improvement in reading comprehension skills as measured by visual analysis and the effect size between means. However, there were slight differences for the RAAC intervention over the tablet intervention for one participant. The time required to administer the tablet intervention was shorter than the time required to administer the RAAC intervention (an average of 12.73 minutes for the RAAC vs. 5.45 minutes for the tablet), which is an important consideration when deciding to use an intervention.

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