Content provided in partnership with

Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

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

<< Page 1 Continued from page 8. Previous | Next

Participants. To assess the overall program effects, we used the entire population of students for both the first and second year. The student population during the first year consisted of 84 students-49 in Oglethorpe Avenue School in Clarke County, Georgia and 35 in Greensboro Primary School in Greene County, Georgia. The students at Oglethorpe Avenue were of mixed socioeconomic status. Approximately 60% were AfricanAmerican; the remainder were European-American. In Greensboro, 85% of the students were African-American and were predominantly from homes with a lower socioeconomic status. The student population during the second year was similar except it was considerably larger.

More Articles of Interest: 5 SUREFIRE STRATEGIES for Developing READING FLUENCY - Brief Article; From Phonics to Fluency; Reading Fluency: The Whole Is More than the Parts; Developing reading fluency with repeated reading.; What Research Has to Say About Fluency Instruction

In the first year, all four teachers were female. One was African-American, and three were European-American. One had 2 years' experience; the remainder 9 to 10 years. During the second year, we added one teacher at Oglethorpe Avenue School and three teachers at Barnett Shoals School in Clarke County. We also added two more teachers at Greensboro. Of the six new teachers, one teacher was male; the remainder were female. Two teachers were African-American; the remainder were European-American. Two of the new teachers had fewer than 5 years' experience; the remainder had more than 10 years' experience.

The second-grade students who participated from Oglethorpe Avenue and Greensboro were demographically similar to those who participated the first year. The additional students from Barnett Shoals contained a wider variety of parental backgrounds. Approximately 40% of these students were African-American. We had an exceptionally high rate of mobility during the second year. At some point, 180 different students participated the second year, but only 125 were present from beginning to end.

Procedure. All students participating in the project were given the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI, Leslie c\ Caldwell, 1988), an individually administered informal reading inventory, during the first month of school and the last month of school. During the first year, the QRI was also administered in February as an interim measure. The QRI was chosen because it gives equal emphasis to oral reading and comprehension, matching our program objectives. According to the material in the manual, alternate form reliability was high. For the eight levels of the test, Leslie and Caldwell (1988) reported that all reliabilities were above 80%, and threequarters were above 90%. In addition, Leslie and Caldwell reported the concurrent validity of the QRI, as measured by the correlations between instructional level on the QRI and performance on an unnamed standardized achievement test, ranged between .44 and .72 with the majority of correlations above .70.

Year One. Figure 2 shows the QRI results for the first year. As shown on that figure, students made an average gain of 1.88 grade levels in their instructional level over the course of the year. This gain was uniform for all four classes. The ordinary assumption is that students will average about one year's growth in one year's time. We compared the actual growth to this assumed growth through a series of ?-tests. For each class, we tested whether the mean growth was significantly different from one year. In all four classes, it was (all p

Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction

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

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference