Increasing Elementary-aged Students’ Reading Fluency with Small-group Interventions: A Comparison of Repeated Reading, Listening Passage Preview, and Listening Only Strategies

Abstract

Although reading fluency is one of the five essential early-reading skills students must develop, many elementary-aged students in the United States do not read age-appropriate material fluently. As such, small-group interventions are practical and often more time efficient than individualized interventions aimed to address this problem. However, few small-group interventions targeting students’ reading fluency have been empirically evaluated. The primary purpose of this study was to examine three small-group reading interventions that have been used to improve students’ reading fluency (repeated reading, listening passage preview, and listening only). Using an alternating-treatments design, the effects of each intervention were evaluated with four-second-grade students with average to below average reading skills. Students’ words read correctly per minute (immediately following and 2 days after intervention) served as the outcome measures. Results supported the repeated reading intervention, followed by listening passage preview, as most effective. Findings also suggested that improvements from each intervention remained 2 days later.