Ask Freddy

Ask Freddy Posted 05/05/2008 Permanent Link

QuickReads with Special Education Students

The use of the QuickReads program has definitely proven to be effective with struggling readers. In a study conducted independently of the publisher or developer of QuickReads and soon to be published in the prestigious journal, Journal of Educational Psychology, Vadasy and Sanders report that those students who began with below-grade-level word reading skill made the greatest gains in reading accuracy and fluency as a result of the QuickReads intervention.

These findings lead Vadasy and Sanders (2008) to design and implement another study that focused only on below-grade-level students in fourth and fifth grades. This study, which will soon be published in Remedial and Special Education, showed that below grade-level fourth and fifth graders achieved significantly higher on measures of vocabulary, word comprehension, and passage comprehension than the classroom controls as a result of the QuickReads intervention.

Additional evidence that the QuickReads program supports struggling readers comes from Hiebert (2005). In that study, students in the bottom quartile made substantially higher gains as a result of repeatedly reading QuickReads texts than those who read texts in basal anthologies (a gain of 42 words per minute for the QuickReads group; 17 for the basal anthology group). In another study, Hiebert (2006) reported that 38 percent of the students who had been in the bottom quartile moved into the second quartile as a result of the QuickReads intervention.

In all of these efforts, educators and students worked hard and extensively to support the reading growth of learning disabled students. These research studies show that the goal of meaningful and fluent reading is aided when learning disabled students read from accessible texts such as those in the QuickReads program.

References

Hiebert, E.H. (2005). The effects of text difficulty on second graders’ fluency development. Reading Psychology, 26, 183-209.

Hiebert, E.H. (2006). Becoming fluent: What difference do texts make? In S.J. Samuels & A.E. Farstrup (Eds.), What research has to say about reading fluency. (pp. 204-226). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Vadasy, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2008). Benefits of repeated reading intervention for low-achieving fourth- and fifth-grade students. Remedial and Special Education, 29 (4), 235-249.

Vadasy, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2008). Repeated reading intervention: Outcomes and interactions with readers’ skills and classroom instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 100 (2), 272-290.

Vadasy, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2009). Supplemental Fluency Intervention and determinants of reading outcomes. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12 (5), 383-425.