Monitoring Reading Component Skills during a Word-Level Intervention for Adolescents with Limited Reading Proficiency

Abstract

This study examined incremental change for several reading component skills while adolescents were actively learning a word-level intervention and measured pre-/postintervention change in skills. Six ninth graders in two different classes participated during the 2019–2020 academic year. Primary analysis was based on an A-B single-case design across behaviors and participants to observe change in skills proximal to the intervention. Visual analyses of baseline and intervention phase data indicated correlational relationships between the word-level intervention and word identification of multisyllabic words and oral reading fluency. Specifically, an aggregate Tau-U statistical calculation for prosody showed a moderate 0.70 effect size. Secondary analysis indicated a statistically significant group effect for improved strategy knowledge and skill with a 0.90 effect size but no statistically significant group effects for silent reading fluency or sentence comprehension. Discussion includes connections between progress monitoring and reading theory as well as limitations and implications for researchers and practitioners.