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Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M

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* What types of books do children choose during choice reading?

If children are to benefit from reading during choice reading, they need to choose books that are at or near their instructional levels. (At least this is the conventional wisdom, but see Carver and Leibert, 1995.) We wanted to examine the relative difficulty of books that children chose and its impact on reading development. We also wanted to see why children chose the books they did.

* What are the effects of the program on struggling readers?

Given Stanovich's (1986) notion of Matthew Effects and Ailington's (1983b) observations about the differences in the amount of reading done by struggling and normally achieving readers, we felt that radically increasing the amount of reading would have an especially large effect on struggling readers.

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To assess the effectiveness of the program, we conducted a series of evaluations. Because this program is complex and was undertaken over the course of two years, the evaluation procedures are complex as well. Some evaluations used the entire population of participating children; others used only a sample of that population. Because the samples differ from substudy to substudy, they will be reported as separate studies, with a description of the sample, methods, results, and discussion.

The studies reported below come from our questions about the program, beginning with whether it could be sustained and whether it affected children's growth in reading to more specific questions about components of the program. Some of these questions were generated by the researchers; others came from concerns of the participating teachers.

Study 1-Overall Program Evaluation

Because of the nature of the program and our theoretical orientation discussed earlier, we used a measure of oral reading with comprehension to evaluate the program. The basic design used was a pretest-posttest design in which children's reading scores in August were compared with their achievement in May. (The first year we also included an interim measure in February.)

Traditionally program evaluations are conducted with either an experimental or quasi-experimental design (Campbell & Stanley 1966). In such a design, there is a treatment group and a control group. We had originally planned to use the first year to develop the program, conducting only formative studies and one pretest-posttest evaluation. The second year was intended to be an experimental test of the program developed in the first year. However, the results of the first year were so unexpectedly strong that we felt that denying treatment to a control set of classes was unethical. Therefore, we decided to use all of our classes as treatment classes, and we developed a pretest-posttest design to evaluate the program.

The logic for the analysis is that if the program is more successful than conventional instruction, children then will make greater progress on a standard measure of reading than the one-year growth expected in one year's time. If such growth occurs in a substantial proportion of the treatment classrooms, we then can argue that this growth is due not to chance variations but to the effects of the program itself.

Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2005 by Stahl, Steven A, Heubach, Kathleen M

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