Contrasting the Effectiveness of Fluency Interventions for Students with or at Risk for Learning Disabilities: A Multilevel Random Coefficient Modeling Meta–Analysis

Abstract

This study had two purposes. First, we sought to compare the overall effectiveness of different types of fluency interventions for students with learning disabilities (LD). Second, we attempted to identify how individual– and class–level characteristics moderated each intervention's effectiveness. We used multilevel random coefficient modeling to analyze results from 30 single–subject studies involving 107 students with or at risk for LD. Doing so allowed us to assess the intervention's impact in terms of both intercept– (i.e., mean difference between study phases) and slope–level (i.e., rate of growth) changes. Results indicated that two motivation–focused interventions were significantly more effective than other types of interventions across gender, age, and placement. The least effective intervention was word recognition training; this finding was consistent across all levels of analyzed variables.