A randomized control study of instructional approaches for struggling adult readers.

This study measured the effectiveness of various instructional approaches on the reading outcomes of 198 adults who read single words at the 3.0 through 5.9 grade equivalency levels. The students were randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: Decoding and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, Fluency, and Extensive Reading; Extensive Reading; and a Control/Comparison approach. The Control/Comparison approach employed a curriculum common to community-based adult literacy programs, and the Extensive Reading approach focused on wide exposure to literature. The Fluency component was a guided repeated oral reading approach, and the Decoding/Comprehension components were SRA/McGraw-Hill Direct Instruction Corrective Reading Programs. Results indicated continued weaknesses in and poor integration of participants' skills. Although students made significant gains independent of reading instruction group, all improvements were associated with small effect sizes. When reading instruction group was considered, only one significant finding was detected, with the Comparison/Control group, the Decoding and Fluency group, and the Decoding, Comprehension, Extensive Reading and Fluency group showing stronger word attack outcomes than the Extensive Reading group.

Modeling child-based theoretical reading constructs with struggling adult readers.

This study examined whether measurement constructs behind reading-related tests for struggling adult readers are similar to what is known about measurement constructs for children. The sample included 371 adults reading between the third-and fifth-grade levels, including 127 men and 153 English speakers of other languages. Using measures of skills and subskills, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test child-based theoretical measurement models of reading: an achievement model of reading skills, a core deficit model of reading subskills, and an integrated model containing achievement and deficit variables. Although the findings present the best measurement models, the contribution of this article is the description of the difficulties encountered when applying child-based assumptions to developing measurement models for struggling adult readers.

Measuring adult literacy students' reading skills using the Gray Oral Reading Test.

There are not enough reading tests standardized on adults who have very low literacy skills, and therefore tests standardized on children are frequently administered. This study addressed the complexities and problems of using a test normed on children to measure the reading comprehension skills of 193 adults who read at approximately third through fifth grade reading grade equivalency levels. Findings are reported from an analysis of the administration of Form A of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fourth Edition (Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001a, b). Results indicated that educators and researchers should be very cautious when interpreting test results of adults who have difficulty reading when children's norm-referenced tests are administered.