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Fluency Interventions and the Impact on Comprehension

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Fluency Interventions and the Impact on Comprehension

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Tips for Teaching Comprehension Strategies

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Tips for Teaching Comprehension Strategies

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Ranked #1 by K-5 Teachers* Already being used in nearly half of the school districts in the U.S. and Canada and 155+ countries worldwide, discover how Reading A-Z's affordable, easy-to-use teacher resources fill the teaching gaps left by many reading education programs. "I absolutely love Reading A-Z!

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I've noticed that many books about reading, and specifically about comprehension for that matter, don't even define what "comprehension" is. Perhaps it's assumed that we all know what it is; or maybe "comprehension" is a slippery term that we have trouble grasping, or "comprehending," if you will!

Webster's Collegiate Dictionary offers this definition: "capacity of the mind to perceive and understand." Reading comprehension, then, would be the capacity to perceive and understand the meanings communicated by texts. Simple, huh? Clear. Now we comprehend comprehension!

Ah! A closer look at reading shows that this issue is much more complicated than it seems. Facile definitions coupled with the complicated nature of reading comprehension is what keeps us from understanding it fully, and from teaching it as well as we can.

Let me focus on a few issues to help explain successful reading comprehension.
Comprehension requires the reader to be an active constructor of meaning.
Reading research has demonstrated that readers do not simply "perceive" the meaning that is IN a text. In fact, expert readers co-construct meaning WITH a text. The research base shows that reading is a "transaction" in which the reader brings purposes and life experiences to bear to converse with the text. This meeting of the reader and the text results in the meaning that is comprehension. Comprehension always attends to what is coded or written in the text, but it also depends upon the reader's background experiences, purposes, feelings, and needs of the moment. That's why we can read the same book or story twice and it will have very different meanings for us. We, as readers, are an equal and active partner with the text in the meaning-making process of comprehension.
What processes and strategies are required to be an active constructor of meaning as a reader?
Again, the processes have been underarticulated. There is wide agreement among reading researchers that every time a reader reads anything, they make use of the following strategies:

Activate prior knowledge, and connect the applicable prior experiences to the reading (if students don't have the requisite background knowledge about a topic, they will be unable to comprehend)

Set Purposes

Predict

Decode Text: identify word and sentence meanings

Summarize: bring meaning forward throughout the reading, building on prior information to create new and fuller meanings

Visualize: see characters, settings, situations, ideas, mental models

Question

Monitor understanding: the most salient difference between good and poor readers is that good readers know when - and often why - they are not comprehending

Use Clarifying and Corrective strategies where needed

Reflect on and Apply the meaning that has been made to new situations

Three points:

1. Since these strategies are used every time anybody reads, if your kids don't use all these strategies, then these are the ones to teach them first. They have the greatest transfer value.

2. We need to know HOW to teach these strategies and give them over to students (this is where the featured techniques of think-alouds and action strategies come in). Simply explaining the techniques won't suffice. Students need help in the process of HOW to do it. Just as explaining how to ski won't be sufficient to get a novice down the hill, neither is explaining a text, or explaining a comprehension strategy, going to do the job in promoting comprehension.

3. These strategies are necessary to reading comprehension in all situations, but they are usually insufficient to comprehension. Readers of any text generally go well beyond these general process strategies as they use engagement strategies to create a textual world, move around in it, evaluate it, etc. As students get older and read more sophisticated texts they must also learn how to meet the demands of making meaning with new text structures (argument, classification, satire, definition, fable, etc.) and new task-specific conventions (like those to tip off a reader to irony, symbolism, unreliable narrators, etc.). A reader who reads a satire or an ironic monologue - or even a fable, for that matter - using only general process strategies will not comprehend it. She needs text, and task, specific strategies to notice that a text is ironic, and to know what to do as a result.

Yes, comprehension and teaching it are more complicated than most of us think!
Finally - teachers of reading have another big problem. We are expert readers ourselves.
That means that we literally do hundreds of things every time they read that are automatic. This automaticity means that we are unaware of what we are doing as we read. And all of the stances and strategies that we use are not made available to our struggling readers. In fact, our struggling readers don't even know they are supposed to be using all of these strategies.

The kids who most need our help are the ones who are the least like us. And the best way to help them is to take off the tops of our heads, to become aware of and share what we are doing as readers. We need to explicitly model what we do, guide and nurture them to do the same things, and then create situations that will encourage and help them to purposefully use the same strategies. I propose the teaching model of:

I DO - YOU WATCH
I DO - YOU HELP
YOU DO TOGETHER - I HELP
YOU DO INDEPENDENTLY - I WATCH

Another way of putting it is from the students' perspectives:

SHOW ME - HELP ME - LET ME

Using think-alouds and action strategies, two rich sets of teaching techniques, are ways of doing just that. See the Think-Aloud Stategies page for guidelines to implement them in your classroom.

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Understanding Reading Comprehension | Scholastic

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I've noticed that many books about reading, and specifically about comprehension for that matter, don't even define what "comprehension" is. Perhaps it's assumed that we all know what it is; or maybe "comprehension" is a slippery term that we have trouble grasping, or "comprehending," if you will!

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When students engage in smooth, efficient processing of text with deep understanding, they can steadily increase their abilities. 

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When students engage in smooth, efficient processing of text with deep understanding, they can steadily increase their abilities. 

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Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2012). Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality. The Reading Teacher; Newark, 66(4), 268.

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What if parents/students are not willing to participate?

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What if parents/students are not willing to participate?

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How Much Reading Gain Should by Expected from Reading Interventions

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How Much Reading Gain Should by Expected from Reading Interventions

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This week's challenging question:

I had a question from some schools people that I'm not sure how to answer. I wonder if anyone has data on what progress can be expected of students in the primary grades getting extra help in reading. Let's assume that the students are getting good/appropriate instruction, and the data were showing that 44% of students (originally assessed as "far below") across grades 1-3 were on pace to be on grade level after two years of this extra help.

Is this expected progress for such students or less than what has been shown for effective early reading interventions?

This is a very complicated question. No wonder the field has largely ducked it. Research is very clear that amount of instruction matters in achievement (e.g., Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010), and there are scads of studies showing that various ways of increasing the amount of teaching can have a positive impact on learning (e.g., preschool, full-day kindergarten, afterschool programs, summer school programs).

Although many think that within-the-school-day interventions are effective because the intervention teachers are better or the methodology is different, but there is good reason to think that the effects are mediated by the amount of additional teaching that the interventions represent. (Title I programs have been effective when delivered after school and summer, but not so much with the daytime within school (Weiss, Little, Bouffard, Deschenes, & Malone, 2009); there are concerns about RtI programs providing interventions during reading instruction instead of in addition to it (Balu, Zhu Doolittle, Schiller, Jenkins, & Gersten, 2015)).

Research overwhelmingly has found that a wide-range of reading interventions work - that is the kids taught by them outperform similar control group kids on some measure or other - but such research has been silent about the size of gains that teachers can expect from them (e.g., Johnson & Allington, 1991). There are many reasons for such neglect:

1. Even though various interventions "work" there is a great deal of variation in effectiveness from study to study.

2. There is a great deal of variation within studies too - just because an intervention works over all, doesn't mean it works with everybody who gets it, just that it did better on average.

3. There is a great deal of variation in the measures used to evaluate learning in these studies - for example, if an early intervention does a good job improving decoding ability or fluency, should that be given as much credibility as one that evaluated success with a full-scale standardized test that included comprehension, like the accountability tests schools are evaluated on?

4. Studies have been very careful to document learning by some measure or other, but they have not been quite as rigorous when it comes to estimating the dosages provided. In my own syntheses of research, I have often had to provide rough guestimates as to the amounts of extra teaching that were actually provided to students (that is, how much intervention was delivered).

5. Even when researchers have done a good job of documenting numbers and lengths of lessons delivered, it has been the rare intervention that was evaluated across an entire school year - and, I can't think of any examples, off hand, of any such studies longer than that. That matters because it raises the possibility of diminishing returns. What I mean is that a program with a particular average effect size over a 3-month period may have a lower size of effect when carried out for six or 12 months. (Such a program may continue to increase the learning advantage over those longer periods, but the average size of the advantage might be smaller).

Put simply? This is a hell of a thing to try to estimate - as useful as it would be for schools.

One interesting approach to this problem is the one put forth by Fielding, Kerr, & Rosier, 2007. They estimated that the primary grade students in their schools were making an average year's gain of one year for 60-80 minutes per day of reading instruction. Given this, they figured that students who were behind and were given additional reading instruction through pullout interventions, etc. would require about that many extra minutes of teaching to catch up. So, they monitored kids' learning and provided interventions, and over a couple of years of that effort, managed to pull their schools up from about 70% of third graders meeting or exceeding standards to about 95% - and then they maintained that for several years.

Fielding and company's general claim is that the effects of an intervention should be in proportion to the effects of regular teaching ... thus, if most kids get 90 minutes per day teaching and, on average, they gain a year's worth on a standardized measure, then giving some of the kids an extra 30 minutes teaching per day, should move those kids an additional three to four months. That would mean that they would pick up an extra grade level for every two to three years of intervention. I'm skeptical about the accuracy of that, but it is an interesting theory.

Meta-analyses have usually reported the average effect sizes for various reading interventions to be about .40 (e.g., Hattie, 2009). For example, one-to-one tutoring has a 0.41 effect (Elbaum, Vaughn, Tejero Hughes, & Watson Moody, 2000.

However, those effects estimates can vary a great deal, depending on when the studies were done (older studies tend to have less rigorous procedures and higher effects, etc.), by the kind of measures used (comprehension outcomes tend to be lower than those obtained for foundational skills, and standardized tests tend to result in lower effects than experimenter-made ones), etc.

For example, in a review of such studies with students in grades 4-12, the average effect size with standardized tests was only .21 (Scammacca, Roberts, Vaughn, & Stuebing, 2015); and in another sample of studies, the impact on standardized comprehension tests was .36 (Wanzek, Vaughn, Scammacca, Gatlin, Walker, & Capin, 2016).

You can see how rough these estimates are, but let's just shoot in the middle someplace: 0.25-0.30 (a statistic I obviously just made up, but you can see the basis on which I made it up - relying most heavily on the best studies, the best and most appropriate measures).

What does that mean? As long as we are talking about primary grade kids and typical standardized reading tests, the usual size of a standard deviation is about one year. In other words, if you took a 3rd grade Gates-MacGinitie and tested an average group of second and third graders with it, you'd find about one standard deviation difference in scores between the grade level groups. (Those connections between amount of time and standard deviation change as you move up the grades, so you can't easily generalize up the grades what I am claiming here).

Thus, if you have a second-grader who is one full year behind at the beginning of the year (that is the class gets a 2.0 grade equivalent score in reading, but this child gets a 1.0), and the student is in a good classroom program and an effective intervention, we should see the class accomplishing a 3.0 (that would be the year's gain for the year's instruction), and the laggard student should score at a 2.25-2.30.

All things equal, if we kept up this routine for three to four years, this child would be expected to close the gap. That sounds great, but think of all the assumptions behind it: (1) the student will make the same gain from classroom teaching that everyone else does; (2) the intervention will be effective; (3) the intervention will be equally effective each year - no one will back off on their diligence just because the gap is being closed, and what was helpful to a second-grader will be equally helpful with a third-grader; (4) the intervention will continue to be offered year-to-year; and (5) that the tests will be equally representative of the learning elicited each year.

That tells you how much gain the group should make. Your question doesn't tell how far behind the kids were when they started, nor does it tell how much gain was made by the 56% who didn't reach grade level ... so moving 44% of them to grade level in two years may or may not be very good. I could set up the problem - plugging in some made up numbers that would make the above estimates come out perfectly, which would suggest that their intervention is having average effectiveness ... or I could plug in numbers that might lead you to think that this isn't an especially effective intervention.

I have to admit, from all of this, I don't know whether their intervention is a good one or not. However, this exercise suggests to me that I'd be seeking an intervention that provides at least, on average, a quarter to a third of a standard deviation in extra annual gain for students. And, that has some value.

References

Balu, R., Zhu, P., Doolittle, F., Schiller, E., Jenkins, J., & Gersten, R. (2015). Evaluation of response to intervention practices for elementary school reading. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Elbaum, B., Vaughn, S., Tejero Hughes, M., & Watson Moody, S. (2000). How effective are one-to-one tutoring programs in reading for elementary students at risk for reading failure? A meta-analysis of the intervention research. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 605-619.

Fielding, L., Kerr, N., & Rosier, P. (2007). Annual growth for all students... Catch up growth for those who are behind. Kennewick, WA: New Foundation Press.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, P., & Allington, R. (1991). Remediation. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (vol. 3, pp. 1013-1046). New York: Longman.

Scammacca. N.K., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., & Stuebing, K.K. (2015). A meta-analysis of interventions for struggling readers in grades 4-12: 1980-2011. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 48, 369-390.

Sonnenschein, S., Stapleton, L. M., & Besnon, A. (2010). The relation between the type and of instruction and growth in children's reading competencies. American Educational Research Journal, 47, 358-389.

Weiss, H.B., Little, P.M.D., Bouffard, S.M., Deschenes, S.N., & Malone, H.J. (2009). The federal role in out-of-school learning: After-school, summer school learning, and family instruction as critical learning supports. Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy.

Wanzek, J., Vaughn, S., Scammacca, N., Gatlin, B., Walker, M.A., & Capin, P. (2016). Meta-analyses of the effects of tier 2 type reading interventions in grades K-3. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 551-5

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How Much Reading Gain Should be Expected from Reading Interventions?

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This week's challenging question: I had a question from some schools people that I'm not sure how to answer. I wonder if anyone has data on what progress can be expected of students in the primary grades getting extra help in reading.

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Looking Back to Move Forward with Guided Reading

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Looking Back to Move Forward with Guided Reading

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Reading Comprehension: Strategies That Work

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Reading Comprehension: Strategies That Work

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Portraits of Practice: A Cross-Case Analysis of Two First-Grade Teachers and Their Grouping Practices

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Portraits of Practice: A Cross-Case Analysis of Two First-Grade Teachers and Their Grouping Practices

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5 Strategies for Fluency and Comprehension That Every Reader Can Use

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5 Strategies for Fluency and Comprehension That Every Reader Can Use

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Every student seeks to be a confident, competent reader-regardless of grade level or starting fluency-and parents, teachers, and tutors want to help. To be fully functional in our society, we need to be capable of engaging with a variety of texts, some of which may be more technical, more abstract, or in some other way more challenging than our regular reading diet. When encountering an unfamiliar kind of text, even "good" readers need to learn how to read it and practice reading it in order to read it fluently and actually understand it.

Whether the text exists on paper, as a website or even as an e-book, the strategies for developing fluency and comprehension are the same. When students encounter an unfamiliar, difficult, or unusual piece of text, coach them through these fluency and comprehension strategies:

1. Preview the text- Examine its structure, any illustrations, and unfamiliar vocabulary words before reading

2. Listen to a fluent reading- If possible, listen to a model for correct pronunciation and expression

3. Engage in the act of reading- Make predictions, ask questions, and reread confusing parts. Students can "talk to the text" to get a better understanding

4. Practice reading it aloud- Read the text out loud (sometimes repeatedly) and attend to phrasing and punctuation as guides

5. Answer/Ask questions about the text- Check comprehension after reading to ensure that the meaning of the text has been understood

Using a similar approach can be helpful for students today as they endeavor to meet the Common Core Standards that set requirements for reading not only for English language arts, but also for reading in the content areas of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This means that students need to be able to read a variety of genres - and not only narrative text, but informational text as well. By doing so, they can gain familiarity with various text structures and elements, as well as literary, cultural and background knowledge that can be applied in their subsequent reading experiences.

Through instruction and practice in reading a variety of texts, students will become fluent and able to comprehend all genres and all school subjects - and achieve the vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21 st century!

Scientific Learning Reading Assistant™ gives K-12 students real-time, guided practice in using these reading strategies. Request a free demo>>

Related Reading:

Building Fluent Readers: How Oral Reading Practice Helps Reading Comprehension

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

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5 Strategies for Fluency and Comprehension That Every Reader Can Use

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Every student seeks to be a confident, competent reader-regardless of grade level or starting fluency-and parents, teachers, and tutors want to help. To be fully functional in our society, we need to be capable of engaging with a variety of texts, some of which may be more technical, more abstract, or in some other way more challenging than our regular reading diet.

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5 Recommendations for Improving Reading Comprehension in K

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5 Recommendations for Improving Reading Comprehension in K

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What is the most effective amount of time for Guided Reading lessons?

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What is the most effective amount of time for Guided Reading lessons?

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What is Fluency?

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Infographic: Fluency, Comprehension, & Guided Reading

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Infographic: Fluency, Comprehension, & Guided Reading

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Did you know? Research shows that reading fluency is key to building comprehension, but also that teachers have difficulty fitting in time to work on fluency in the classroom.

Check out ways you can work on this crucial skill, including 10 steps for maximizing your guided reading group work-in our new infographic on fluency and comprehension in the classroom.

Check it out below or click here to download

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Infographic: Fluency, Comprehension & Guided Reading - WeAreTeachers

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Did you know? Research shows that reading fluency is key to building comprehension, but also that teachers have difficulty fitting in time to work on fluency in the classroom. Check out ways you can work on this crucial skill, including ...

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Please view our new page for upcoming and exciting things happening this 2020 school year!

About Dr. Jan Richardson

Jan Richardson, Ph.D., is an author, education consultant, reading specialist, former Reading Recovery® Teacher Leader, and former classroom teacher (K-college). Often called America's leading expert in guided reading, her best-selling collection includes The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading, Guided Reading Teacher's Companion, Next Step Guided Reading in Action, Next Step Guided Reading Assessment (co-authored with Maria Walther), Next Step Forward in Reading Intervention (co-authored with Ellen Lewis), Next Step in Word Study and Phonics (co-authored with Michele Dufresne), and Literacy Footprints: A Complete System for Supporting Guided Reading (also co-authored with Michele Dufresne). Jan's most recent work, the RISE program, co-authored with Ellen Lewis and published by Scholastic, provides a powerful, short-term, small group reading intervention with targeted, intensive instruction to help striving readers meet grade-level benchmarks.

Dr. Richardson and her expert team of literacy consultants provide schools and school districts with customized professional development and demonstration lessons designed to equip teachers with practical and effective techniques for strengthening small-group reading instruction. The goal is for every student to become a better reader who just can't wait to read another book!

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Please view our new page for upcoming and exciting things happening this 2020 school year! About Dr. Jan Richardson Jan Richardson, Ph.D., is an author, education consultant, reading specialist, former Reading Recovery® Teacher Leader, and former classroom teacher (K-college).

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Our library provides teachers with effective, research-based classroom strategies to help build and strengthen literacy skills in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.

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Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality

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Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality

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                                               Literature Review Summaries

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                                               Literature Review Summaries

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An introduction to using guided reading in your classroom from Dr. Gay Su Pinnell, America's leading guided reading authority. Getting started, sample lessons, and more!

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When Guided Reading Isn't Working: Strategies for Effective Instruction

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When Guided Reading Isn't Working: Strategies for Effective Instruction

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How do you measure if Guided Reading is successful and effective for students? 

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How do you measure if Guided Reading is successful and effective for students? 

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I plan to study strategies and best practices for improving reading skills during guided reading because I want to find out how to better teach my students so that I may better understand how to improve student’s comprehension and reading fluency.

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I plan to study strategies and best practices for improving reading skills during guided reading because I want to find out how to better teach my students so that I may better understand how to improve student’s comprehension and reading fluency.

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How to Conduct Collaborative Action Research

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How to Conduct Collaborative Action Research

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Sagor, R. (1992). How to Conduct Collaborative Action Research. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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Action Research: A Guide for the Teacher Researcher

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Action Research: A Guide for the Teacher Researcher

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Mills, G. E. (2014). Action Research: A Guide for the Teacher Researcher. Pearson.