Engaging Struggling Early Readers to Promote Reading Success: A Pilot Study of Reading by Design
In this study, we piloted a Tier 2 intervention designed to improve reading skills among struggling early readers using an intervention that included SRA Reading Mastery, listening while reading activities, strategies to increase motivation and engagement in reading, and parent involvement in reading homework. The study included 6 students in Grade 1 and 5 students in Grade 2 (N 11) all of whom were failing to meet grade level reading benchmarks. We delivered the intervention in small, grade based groups for 35 min 4 times per week for 4 months. Pretest and posttest performance on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests Third Edition using grade based standard scores indicated significant improvement on the Total Reading cluster (p .0017, d 1.23) and the following subtests: Oral Reading Fluency (p .0095, d 1.21) Word Attack (p .0064, d 0.89) Passage Comprehension (p .0207, d 0.66) and Word Identification (p .0245, d 0.93) We discuss implications for practice and future research.