Comparison of Reading Growth Among Students With Severe Reading Deficits Who Received Intervention to Typically Achieving Students and Students Receiving Special Education.

This study compared the reading growth of students with and without learning disabilities, and students with and without reading deficits in response to tier 2 reading interventions within a response-to-intervention framework. Participants were 499 second- and third-grade students in six urban schools. Students who scored at or below the 10th percentile on the fall reading screening assessment were identified as having a severe reading deficit and received a tier 2 reading intervention that was targeted to their needs. Results showed a significant effect between groups on reading growth. Students with severe reading deficits receiving targeted tier 2 intervention grew at a rate that equaled the rate of growth of students without reading deficits and was significantly higher than students who were receiving special education services for reading. Implications for practice, suggestions for future research, and study limitations are discussed.

Comparison of progress monitoring data from general outcome measures and specific subskill mastery measures for reading.

Interventionists often monitor the progress of students receiving supplemental interventions with general outcome measures (GOMs) such as curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R). However, some researchers have suggested that interventionists should collect data more closely related to instructional targets, specific subskill mastery measures (SSMMs) because outcomes from GOMs such as CBM-R may not be sufficiently sensitive to gauge intervention effects. In turn, interventionists may prematurely terminate an effective intervention or continue to deliver an ineffective intervention if they do not monitor student progress with the appropriate measure. However, such recommendations are based upon expert opinion or studies with serious methodological shortcomings. We used multi-variate multilevel modeling to compare pre-intervention intercepts and intervention slopes between GOM and SSMM data collected concurrently in a sample of 96 first, 44 second, and 53 third grade students receiving tier 2 phonics interventions. Statistically significant differences were observed between slopes from SSMM consonant-vowel-consonant words and CBM-R data. Statistically significant differences in slopes were not observed for consonant blend, digraph or consonant-vowel-consonant-silent e (CVCe) SSMMs. Results suggest that using word lists to monitor student response to instruction for early struggling readers is beneficial but as students are exposed to more complex phonetic patterns, the distinction between SSMMs and CBM-R become less meaningful.

Accuracy of student performance while reading leveled books rated at their instructional level by a reading inventory.

Identifying a student's instructional level is necessary to ensure that students are appropriately challenged in reading. Informal reading inventories (IRIs) purport to assess the highest reading level at which a student can accurately decode and comprehend text. However, the use of IRIs in determining a student's instructional level has been questioned because of a lack of research. The current study examined the percentage of words read correctly with 64 second- and third-grade students while reading from texts at their instructional level as determined by an IRI. Students read for 1 min from three leveled texts that corresponded to their instructional level as measured by an IRI, and the percentage of words read correctly was recorded. The percentage read correctly correlated across the three books from r=.47 to r=.68 and instructional level categories correlated from tau=.59 to tau=.65. Percent agreement calculations showed that the categorical scores (frustration, instructional, and independent) for the three readings agreed approximately 67% to 70% of the time, which resulted in a kappa estimate of less than .50. Kappa coefficients of .70 are considered strong indicators of agreement. Moreover, more than half of the students with the lowest reading skills read at a frustration level when attempting to read books rated at their instructional level by an IRI. The current study questions how reliably and accurately IRIs identify students' instructional level for reading.