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Three Things Research Tells Us about Interventions for Struggling Readers

This article, excerpted from a larger guidance document from the Center on Instruction, looks at what research tells us about helping students who read below grade level, and highlights the following findings: 1) schools must provide varied instructional support, based on the degree and nature of the student's difficulty; 2) it is important for students to learn comprehension strategies, and strategy instruction should be coordinated between literacy specialists and content-area teachers; and 3) more research is needed to prove which instructional improvements are really effective.

When considering research findings, we can draw several conclusions about effective instruction for struggling readers.

First, schools need to be able to provide high-quality instruction in both word-level and comprehension skills in order to meet the diverse needs of students who continue to struggle with reading in late-elementary, middle, and high school. Because struggling readers differ in both the degree and the nature of their reading problems, their instructional supports need to vary in intensity and focus. Some students with adequate word-level skills who perform slightly below grade level might be effectively served through differentiated instruction in content-area classes.

Many other students, however, will need much more intensive reading instruction than content area teachers alone can provide. There is a clear role for reading specialists in middle and high school to provide intensive, focused instruction to students with serious gaps in their reading skill, including students with learning disabilities.

Second, with the exception of instruction to increase reading accuracy and fluency, the content of effective literacy instruction for students reading below grade is very similar to that recommended for students reading at grade level and above. As with students reading at grade level, general recommendations include instruction to help students apply reading comprehension strategies more effectively before, during, and after reading, instruction to increase the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge, instruction and assignments that are motivating and engaging, and instruction that improves knowledge of content-area concepts and facts.

The overlap between the instructional needs of struggling readers and those reading at grade level suggests the opportunity for carefully coordinated instruction between reading specialists in intensive reading classes and content-area teachers in their subject areas. Many struggling readers may require support beyond that which content-area teachers can provide to become proficient in the use of specific comprehension strategies (more explicit and intensive instruction), but it would seem immensely helpful if content-area teachers were explaining and reinforcing the use of similar strategies with textbooks in social studies, history, science, and so on. In fact, given the problems of obtaining strong impacts on measures of general reading comprehension noted earlier, extending both instructional and practice opportunities in the use of effective reading strategies for struggling readers into the content areas seems a very important instructional innovation for middle and high school.

Third, it is clear that we need more research conducted in real classroom settings over a substantial period of time before we can realistically estimate the extent to which instruction in reading accuracy and fluency, as well as other areas important for reading comprehension, can actually close the reading gap for students with varying degrees of reading impairment.

Most studies conducted thus far have identified instructional procedures that are more effective than a control condition involving "traditional instruction." However, very few of these studies have used standardized measures that provide standard scores or percentile ranks that allow us to estimate the extent to which students have become better readers in relation to grade level reading standards. Further, we are not aware of any studies that have examined changes in performance on state-mandated accountability measures as a result of exposure to the kinds of instructional improvements recommended in this document. Without research with these kinds of measures, it is difficult to specify the necessary instructional conditions for students with various levels and types of reading impairment to make significant improvements toward grade-level reading standards.

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