David D. Paige

Is Fluent, Expressive Reading Important for High School Readers?

This study explores the link between fluency and comprehension through an examination of the importance of prosodic reading in secondary students.

Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers Through Situational Interest: A Model Proposing the Relationships Among Extrinsic Motivation, Oral Reading Proficiency, Comprehension, and Academic Achievement

Reading ability and motivation among adolescents across the country continues to be problematic, as only slightly more than one-third read at a proficient level (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007; Unrau & Schlackman, 2006). Hidi and Renninger (2006) have proposed a four-phase model of situational interest that suggests how activities involving extrinsic motivation can be used to potentially develop intrinsic motivation. Using structural equation modeling, the author proposes a model that connects extrinsic motivation for reading, oral reading fluency, comprehension, and academic achievement to demonstrate how situational interest for reading can be leveraged by the classroom teacher to engage struggling readers in activities that promote literacy achievement in struggling adolescent readers.

Interpreting the Relationships Among Prosody, Automaticity, Accuracy, and Silent Reading Comprehension in Secondary Students

Although identified as a critical component of proficient reading in the primary grades, reading fluency (word recognition accuracy, automaticity, and prosody) is often viewed as less important beyond the early stages of reading acquisition. In the present study, 108 ninth-grade students were assessed to explore the relationships among word recognition accuracy, automaticity, prosody, and vocabulary with silent reading comprehension. Results found large correlations among the variables while regression analysis revealed that accuracy, prosody, and vocabulary explained from 50.1% to 52.7% of the variance in silent reading comprehension. Of note were the findings that word recognition automaticity did not contribute to silent reading comprehension although prosody was found to act as a partial mediator between automaticity and comprehension. Accuracy, automaticity, and prosody were found to form a highly reliable scale reflecting oral reading fluency. These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that secondary students exhibiting appropriate prosody experience advantages in comprehension processing. The tandem theory of reading is introduced to explain the relationship between automaticity and comprehension.

“That Sounded Good!”: Using Whole‐Class Choral Reading to Improve Fluency

Whole-class choral reading (WCCR) is an oral reading fluency strategy that can help older elementary students in need of fluency development. Implementation is simple and requires only a few minutes per day. WCCR can be easily adapted for use with narrative and expository texts and allows all students the opportunity to practice within an environment that provides monitored reader support.

Working inside the Box: Exploring the Relationship between Student Engagement and Cognitive Rigor.

One perspective of cognitive rigor is the extent to which classroom instruction demands students to use critical thinking skills. As schools attempt to increase academic outcomes, one area of interest is the potential for engaging students in learning by increasing the use of critical thinking. The present study analyses the effect of critical thinking on student engagement in ninth-grade students.

Testing the Acceleration Hypothesis: Fluency Outcomes Utilizing Still-Versus Accelerated-Text in Sixth-Grade Students With Reading Disabilities

The acceleration hypothesis views reading rate simultaneously as both an independent and dependent variable that can be manipulated to encourage increases in reading indicators (Breznitz, 2006). Within this conceptualization, reading rate represents all the component sub-processes required for proficient reading and presents the opportunity for a potential training regimen where the student is prompted to maintain a faster than normal reading rate. Potential for improvement in reading indictors is based on the theory that by increasing the amount of text available to working memory, increased comprehension processing may occur. This random assignment study found increases commensurate with a regimen of repeated reading with traditional still-based text.

A path analytic model linking foundational skills to Grade 3 state reading achievement

ABSTRACT Considerable evidence supports that close to two thirds of all fourth-grade students read at less than adequate levels on reading achievement tests and that the problem has persisted for decades. This study of 1,064 third-grade students at risk for reading failure uses path analytic techniques to measure a hypothesized model linking developmental spelling, sight- and pseudo-word reading, and reading fluency to achievement on an end-of-year state reading test. While all hypothesized paths were found to be significant, paths not hypothesized were also significant. These paths included direct effects for spelling development on fluency and reading achievement, as well as the direct effect of sight-word reading on state reading achievement. In total, the model predicted 41.9% of the variance in state reading achievement and found that students proficient at foundational reading skills were 7 times more likely to be proficient on the state reading achievement assessment.

Effects of Intensive Fluency Instruction on the Reading Proficiency of Third-Grade Struggling Readers

ABSTRACT The present study examined the impact of an intensive reading fluency intervention on the overall reading performance of 37 struggling readers in 3rd grade. Students’ 3rd-grade classroom teachers and/or their performance on a state-mandated reading achievement test given toward the end of the 3rd-grade school year identified them for the study. Selected students participated in a 25-session summer reading clinic. The main instructional intervention was the Fluency Development Lesson, which is an intensive fluency instruction program. Immediately prior to and after the summer reading program clinicians pre- and posttested students on a variety of reading competencies. Analyses of pre- and posttest scores showed that students who had received fluency instruction in the summer clinic made substantial and significant gains in their reading performance. This is noteworthy because despite the fact that many students actually lose ground in their reading achievement over summer, these students made significant reading performance gains. We discuss the practical implications of the results.

Reading recovery© won't fix poor core tier-one reading instruction

This essay challenges whether or not the use of district money for Reading Recovery© (RR) instruction is an effective expenditure of funds that results in sustained improvement in student reading outcomes. As a Tier 3 intervention, RR provides expensive, one-on-one tutoring for first- and second-grade readers that is occupying an increasingly larger instructional space across districts. While some studies have shown improvement due to RR, others show these results eventually dissolve. A disturbing trend is advocacy by some RR teachers that RR methods be incorporated into Tier 1 instruction. In this essay we further explore the issues surrounding RR.

Acquisition of Letter Naming Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, and Spelling Knowledge of Kindergarten Children at Risk for Learning to Read

This study measures letter naming, phonological awareness, and spelling knowledge in 2,100 kindergarten students attending 63 schools within a large, urban school district. Students were assessed across December, February, and May of the kindergarten year. Results found that, by May, 71.8% of students had attained full letter naming knowledge. Phonological awareness emerged more slowly with 48% of students able to reliably segment and blend phonemes in words. Spelling development, a measure of phonics knowledge, found that, by May, 71.8% of students were in the partial-alphabetic phase. A series of regression analyses revealed that by the end of kindergarten both letter naming and phonological awareness were significant predictors of spelling knowledge (b = .332 and .518 for LK and PA, resp.), explaining 52.7% of the variance.