Teaching reading to poor readers in the intermediate grades: A comparison of text difficulty.

Abstract

The authors compared the influence of text difficulty-reading-level matched or grade-level matched-on the growth of poor readers' reading ability over 18 weeks of 1-to-1 tutoring. Forty-six 3rd-5th graders, including 25 with disabilities, were assigned randomly to 1 of 2 tutoring approaches or a control condition. Significant differences favored tutored children. Between approaches, the only significant difference was oral reading fluency, which favored students who read material at their reading level. Students who began with lower fluency made stronger gains in text matched to reading level; students with higher fluency profited from both treatments. When the 3 groups were combined, fluency was the strongest contributor to reading comprehension outcomes.

The Simple View, Instructional Level, and the Plight of Struggling Fifth-/Sixth-Grade Readers

“…But note that often the unasked question is this: Why do students who get off to a slow start have so much trouble improving their reading skill in the upper elementary and middle school grades? We believe, along with others (Allington, 2002;O'Connor et al, 2002), that it has to do with a one-size-fits-all instructional mentality. That is, from fourth grade on, low readers are usually instructed in grade-level material whether they have the requisite printprocessing skill or not.…”

Tier 3 Interventions for Students With Significant Reading Problems

“…There were two experimental studies that examined the effects of a multicomponent intervention for students with reading difficulties/disabilities Therrien, Wickstrom, & Jones, 2006). O'Connor et al (2002) included phoneme awareness, word recognition and spelling, fluency, and comprehension in a 30-minute, one-on-one intervention. Treated students outperformed the control condition on norm-referenced measures of phonemic awareness, word reading, comprehension, and fluency.…”

A randomized control trial of Shared Evaluation Pedagogy: The near-term and long-term impact of dialogically organized reading instruction

“…Other studies (e.g., Jordan et al, 2000) have included a focus on vocabulary instruction as a lever for improving students' assessed comprehension. Of those studies that target global comprehension directly, the emphasis is generally on explicit teaching of comprehension strategies such as summarization, question generation and/or specific kinds of comprehension-related tasks, such as locating the main idea of a passage or making inferences about textual meaning (Brown et al, 2005;Leslie & Allen, 1999;O'Connor et al, 2002;Johnson-Glenberg, 2000;Lubliner, 2004;Mason, 2004;Meyer et al, 2002;McGee & Johnson, 2003). We were not able to locate intervention studies that provided opportunities for students to explore textual meaning through authentic, contingent, open dialogue.…”