Repeated reading (RR) is a common fluency intervention, but recent studies comparing RR to continuous reading (CR; i.e., wide reading) found no significant differences in effects. This prompts the question of whether the mechanism that improves skills is repeatedly reading portions of connected text, or simply reading connected text. The current…

The impacts of a summer reading program on students' reading fluency were assessed. Fifteen students in grades first through seventh voluntarily attended a nine-day summer reading program. Participants who attended the program were a good representation of the other students in the school. The school was selected due to the high percentage of…

Two studies explored the technical adequacy of various measures of advanced phonics skills. In Study 1, the advanced phonics measures consisted of pseudowords, real words, or a combination of both. Participants included 39 students in the third grade. Test-retest correlations for all measures were above 0.8 and interrater reliability was high.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of explicitly teaching for transfer of PALS, and to examine whether transfer training helped participants maintain the strategy taught. Sixty-two participants from two third-grade classrooms and one fourth-grade classroom participated in the study. A pretest-posttest-maintenance control group…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a controversial test administration alteration, the read-aloud alteration, in which text (passages and questions) is read aloud to the student on a reading comprehension test. For students whose disabilities impair their skill in decoding text and reading fluently, accessing text to…

Summer setback, which is defined as a decline in academic achievement over the summer months, occurs in many academic areas but seems especially problematic in reading. We assessed students from a midwestern parochial school serving predominantly students from a low--socioeconomic status background for their reading achievement before they left…

The study was implemented in the Title I Marinette School District using a randomized experimental design and parallel quasi experimental design spanning three grades 1-3 in 3 district elementary schools. The Remediation Plus Intervention is a multi-sensory, systematic synthetic phonics curriculum for all ages of students who struggle with…

A 7-month study of 178 students in grades 1-4 at two Blue Ribbon schools compared two daily 20-minute treatments. Eighty-eight students used the 2000-2001 version of Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor (www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen) in 10-computer labs, averaging 19 hours over the course of the year. The Reading Tutor served as a computerized implementation…

The intention of this study was to establish if the third grade English Language Learners improved reading fluency when using the computerized Waterford Early Reading Program. This quantitative study determined the effectiveness of the Waterford Early Reading Program at two Title I elementary schools. Students not meeting Grade Level Expectations…

This study compared the impact of 2 types of small-group interventions targeting below-level 3rd-grade students. The study compared WordWork decoding and spelling instruction (Calfee, Miller, Norman, Wilson, & Trainin, 2006; Calfee & Patrick, 1995), which includes attention to articulation and metacognition, with a more traditional…

This dissertation utilized a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of parent development on rising third graders' summer reading losses as measured by the difference in May and August oral reading fluency scores. Title I parents and students from three schools in a rural North Carolina school district participated in a…

In this research, parents and children participated in a comprehensive book reading intervention designed to improve children's literacy. Over eight weeks during the summer, children in the intervention condition were encouraged to read one book weekly and parents were trained to foster reading comprehension. Forty-eight Grades 3 and 5 children…

The goal of this research was to investigate the effects of teacher read-alouds when students use, versus do not use, student companion texts during the read-alouds. Both quantitative and qualitative research data were collected based on an experimental design which randomly assigned 168 low SES, primarily Hispanic, students to either listen-only…

While animal assisted therapy (AAT) has been a successful part of treatment plans within the medical field for several decades, AAT has not been quantitatively researched as a viable instructional tool that can be used in conjunction with other reading intervention strategies. With over one-third of elementary school aged children experiencing…

Problem: Some students are failing to develop acceptable reading skills; however, instructional time allocated to reading fluency can increase reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to compare students who received repeated reading with pairs of students in a large-group setting with those who did not in terms of reading fluency,…