Using Technology to Increase Reading Fluency
Julie Fellon
Department of Teacher Education
California State University, Sacramento, United States of America
jfellion@rescue.k12.ca.us
Chia-Jung Chung Ph.D.
Department of Teacher Education
California State University, Sacramento, United States of America
cchung@csus.edu
Abstract: The primary goal of this research is to use technology, a computerized reading
fluency program, to increase the rate of fluency for special education students in a middle
school setting. This research used the computer edition of the Read Naturally SE
program, reading levels 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5. The seven students selected for this study were
selected because they possessed all the necessary prerequisite skills for fluency, having
already attained alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, and decoding. The results of
this research are still being compiled but a cursory look at the data appears to support a
correlation between the attendance of the student and increase in fluency. More
importantly, during the intervention, motivation and student work habits, not disability
the students were designated by were the greatest predictors of a greater gain in fluency
Introduction
Literacy is a process of attaining specific skills which build upon each other. Many of my students are
stymied by reading fluency and therefore cannot progress and conquer comprehension. In middle school, many
special education students struggle with trying to read and comprehend grade level texts. As a special education
teacher, the area of remediating and compensating my student’s skills so that they will be successful in the general
education area is of great importance to me. These students who are struggling to learn grade level curriculum but
are burdened with learning deficits need to be remediated with an intervention that will help them attain reading
fluency. Millions of students cannot benefit as fully as possible from their education programs because of their
learning disabilities. (Hasselbring, and Brausch, 2006) Literacy is an area when well thought out and applied
technologies can act as a lifeline to students with learning disabilities. As many as 8 of 10 students with learning
disabilities have reading problems so significant that they cannot read and understand grade level material. (Lerner,
2011).
The Read Naturally intervention includes 7 students in a middle school Special Day classroom. Special
Day is a classroom where all core subjects, math, science, english, and history are taught by a special education
teacher, stressing the use of scaffolding, hands on activities, and lesson plans tailored to the students cognitive level
to encourage student success. The research group is made up of (4) eighth grade boys, (1) eighth grade girl, (1)
seventh grade boy and (1) seventh grade girl. The make-up of my entire classroom consists of 4 girls and 12 boys.
The students selected for the action research have mastered the skills of alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness,
and decoding but are hindered by their lack of fluency in attaining comprehension. All the students in this action
research are reading at commensurate levels. The students are reading at a third and fourth grade reading level.
Review of Literature
Several articles look at different theories and best practices for teaching reading to students. One article by William
Rupley, Timothy Blair and William Nichols explores the necessary elements for creating effective and deliberate
ways to teaching reading. “In Effective Reading Instruction for Struggling Readers,”Rupley addresses the truism
that a teacher’s direct and deliberate instruction coupled with appropriate scaffolding is always an effective teaching
strategy. For Rupley, teaching is an amalgamation of sequential steps which impart modeling and meaning to the
student. This theory which owes it roots to Vygotsky’s Social Theory is moving from theory to practice as teachers
fulfill the evidence of recent research and harness new strategies to make teaching reading meaningful. When
writing about reading instruction, Rupley explains that the “process of explicit/direct instruction is particularly
applicable to the learning of knowledge in an area where there are explicit steps to follow in a step by step fashion.”
(Rupley et al,. 2009) This article doesn’t offer a new perspective on reading instruction but it does help educators to
see a correlation between the advantages of classroom practice and reading acquisition, and the use of direct
instruction and modeling as a best fit for reading instruction. The article offers a sound explanation of direct
instruction and doesn’t overstate student successes to sell its point. Effective Reading Instruction is an important
article for educators exploring options for reading instruction.
Description of Intervention
The intervention consisted of two identical interventions but this study will only look at the data from the first
intervention. The first two days of school were spent training the research students how to use the computer
software. Students were assigned a computer and on the third day of school the intervention began. The students
received thirty minutes of intervention in the Read Naturally SE during their fifth period class. While the students
were using the computers the rest of the class was engaged in SSR, Sustained Silent Reading. The class is very
familiar with SSR , we do it on a regular basis. They know the rules and protocol for SSR. Students keep a book
under their desks and know that during this time they must read silently for a period of thirty minutes. Students are
not allowed to get up from their desks, make noise or engage in anything but reading. An aide in my classroom was
available for the students who were engaged in SSR. My complete attention was trained on the students using the
Read Naturally software.
The intervention program was conducted 5 days a week for six weeks. The intervention includes both a pre and post
test to identify the Correct Words Per Minute read by each student. The students began the first intervention in midAugust and completed the second intervention the week before Winter Break.
Each story level had twelve stories. The stories in table 2 show two numbers. The first number correlates with the
cold timing score for the story number and the second number is the hot timing read. The cold timing is a timing of
the number of CWPM without having seen the passage before. A hot timing is the number of CWPM read after the
student had listened to the story read to them with highlighted lines, practiced the story three times and then read the
story to the teacher. The student is able to select the story they wanted to read. However a student could not choose
another story until they met the criteria for passing the story, or by having a teacher input a password to pass the
students. The criteria for passing the stories was manually inputted by me on an individual basis. If a student didn’t
pass a story, often their hot timing was too low to pass, the researcher required the student to practice the story until
they were able to record a higher hot timing. This occurred frequently with several students. The research question
of this study is: Can the use of technology based fluency program increase the fluency rate of middle school students
with learning disabilities?
Definitons
Fluency is the rate of speed at which a given student reads. The skills necessary to gain in reading are as follows:
Alphabetic principle is the identification of letters to make up words. Phonemic Awareness is the ability to
recognize a letter/sound relationship. Decoding is the ability to use knowledge of letter/ sound relationships to
recognize words. Correct Words per minute or CWPM is an acronym for the fluency count of words that a student
reads at a given minute. Scaffolding is the ability to access prior knowledge, what is understood by a student and
build upon the concept to bridge a new concept.
Assumptions
The assumption of this study is that the students will increase their reading fluency through an intensive
and repetitive fluency program. The students will gain confidence and will feel better able to tackle grade level
curriculum. Students generally have a positive reaction to using technology. The Read Naturally Software Wdition,
appeared to hold more student interest for the student than the CD version of Read Naturally. Stories were nonfiction, high interest short reads, many were about reptiles or people the students had never heard of before.
Limitations
Regular attendance was a major limitation of this research. Students who did not attend regularly did not move as
quickly through the stories and were seemingly not as engaged in the activity of reading. A further observation by
the teacher is that students who did not attend regularly did not notice an increase in their reading rate and were not
intrinsically motivated to work hard at the intervention. Conversely, four of the seven students that did attend
regularly verbalized their belief that they were reading better as a result of the intervention. Motivation was another
unforeseen key limitation in this research. One of the seven students, refused to participate 70% of the time. His
home life had many challenges and he refused to attend school on a regular basis. He expressed to his teacher that he
didn’t care, didn’t want to read better and wanted to just sit not participate in any activity.
Results
With a sample size of seven the results of this data cannot be validly predicted to correlate to a larger sample of
students. However, some useful information was gleaned from this research. First, students who showed more
enthusiasm for the intervention scored a higher differential on the pretest and post tests and showed a greater gain of
CWPM. The rate of enthusiasm was arrived at by looking at the questionnaire completed by the students, and by
keeping a daily log which highlighted student work attitude. Students with more motivation, better work ethics, and
fewer days missed in school scored better than their counterparts that weren’t motivated and missed several days of
school. In fact, student appears in this small sample to be the determining factor about whether or not a student
would be successful. Disability appeared to have less of a key in student success For example, students with the
designation Other Health Impaired (OHI) can and often are limited by their ability to focus during classroom
instruction. They were not born with a learning disability that precludes them for processing information, but rather
students with an OHI often have an attention deficit that precludes them from focusing long enough to learn new
information and assimilate it.
___________________________________________________________________
Table 1
Information for each participant
______________________________________________________________________________
Name
Grade
Gender
Absences
Disability
______________________________________________________________________________
Karly
7
F
0
Intellectually Disabled
Paul
8
M
5
Other Health Impaired
Kenny
8
M
0
Specific Learning Disabled
Alice
8
F
2
Intellectually Disabled
Cory
7
M
9
Specific Learning Disabled
Jonathan
8
M
3
Other Health Impaired
Ronnie
8
M
2
Intellectually Disabled
Grade is the currently grade level the student is in.
Gender refers to the gender of each participant; M male, F female
Number of absences are the number of times the student was absent from the intervention.
Intellectually Disabled is a severe cognitive delay formerly designated as Mental Retardation
Specific Learning Disabled is designated as a Mild to Moderate learning disability, less severe than Intellectually
Delayed .
Other Health Impaired refers to a Mild to Moderate disability often associated with ADD or ADHD.
Table 2
Pre and post test scores, CWPM read on stories 1-12 in 3.5 Read Naturally Software Edition
First number is the cold timing read, second is the hot timing read
______________________________________________________________________________
Pretest
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Post test
Karly 54
54/65 52/63 46/60 55/54 53/59 57/60 59/64 59/70 54/6 3 55/61 59/67 57/66 60
Paul
84 75/102 81/100 79/114 78/99 82/104 88/102 88/113 79/109 82/99 81/103 91/101 89/99 96
Kenny 87 82/101 86/92 87/100 84/88 89/105 89/10 1 90/93 82/87 85/84 79/94 84/95 91/111 103
Alice
67 71/76 69/79 75/80 68/86 75/89 72/91 78/90 78/79 65/82 73/88 80/8 6 72/84 86
Cory
53 54/55 57/62 54/53 53/49
refused to continue program.
Jonathan 71 65/82 78/89 74/90 67/85 78/88 67/91 86/99 76/87 66/75 74/89 77/69 78/99 82
Ronnie 73 83/11 1 80/101 67/83 76’/79 74/89 93/99 78/93 84/9 2 87/98 76/91 89/84 94/103 96
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Measurement of Dependent Variables
The primary dependent variable for this study was the number of CWPM read on a Read Naturally pretest. Each
participant received this test prior to the intervention and immediately following the intervention. The researcher
instructed the participant to read it for 1 min and calculated the number of words read correctly at the end of the 1min timing. The total number of words read correctly per min served as the dependent variable. A word was
considered incorrect if the participant pronounced the word wrong or did not read the word within 3 s of the
previous word being read. Words that were repeated were counted as incorrect. The researcher instructed the
students in how to read the passages, what would and would not be counted as incorrect prior to the reading pretest.
The second dependent variable for this study was pre-intervention and postintervention
oral reading fluency growth rates. This number was reached by subtracting the pre-intervention score from the postintervention score. The difference is the rate of growth that that student made in reading fluency.
Discussion
Using Read Naturally to Increase Fluency consisted of a mixed methods research project. First, fluency data
consisting of pretest, post-test, and individual story fluency scores were used to form the quantitative portion of the
research. Second, a questionnaire filled out by the students at the end of the intervention, and a daily log kept by the
teacher which ranked student work habits from” very good” to” poor” were used to form the qualitative basis of this
study.
The students with the greatest differential between the pretest and post-test are Kenny and Ronnie. Both gained an
average of 23 CWPM. Along with Paul, who averaged an increase of 12 CWPM, these three students consistently
demonstrated the highest level of work habits during the intervention, as noted in the teacher daily log, higher than
any other participants in the study.
These eighth grade boys were ranked “very good” in each of the intervention sessions and wrote comments that
indicated they felt positive about the intervention. Kenny wrote that he liked doing the intervention because he
“could tell the intervention was working.” Paul commented that the non-fiction stories consisting of short readings
on the black mamba and gila monster amongst others were “very cool.” Ronnie a friendly cooperative young man
seemed engaged and answered that the Read Naturally program was “lotsa (sic) fun.”
Cory and Karly, both in seventh grade experienced the smallest gain in fluency. There are some reasons that might
account for the low gains. Cory’s life outside school was chaotic. During the intervention, Cory’s father was
admitted to the hospital and his mother expressed her concern that the family would be kicked out of their
apartment. Cory’s family moved in with the grandparents and Cory quit working in all subject areas. He missed nine
days of school during the first intervention and only began re-attending school when his parents were served a
school letter promising the state attendance bureaus intervention if Cory’s attendance didn’t improve. Cory’s
attendance improved but his willingness to participate in school vanished. Cory was not motivated to put effort into
the reading intervention. In the questionnaire, Cory wrote that he thought the intervention was “dumb and wasted
time.”
Karly is perhaps the lowest academically functioning student in the survey. Routinely Karly needed assistance from
the teacher in how to log in. Karly didn’t advance through the story without prompting from the teacher and didn’t
read along with the audio of the stories. Karly appeared intent on the task of the intervention, scoring twenty-two”
good” or “very good” but wasn’t able to work independently. Karly was positive in her comments of the program
and wrote that she “liked” the reading and thought that it was “good”.
Jonathan gained eleven CWPM in fluency. Jonathan is very courteous but during the intervention tried to get two of
his friends Kenny and Ronnie off task. Jonathan had to be reassigned a computer on the end of the computer bank so
that he couldn’t distract other students. This was done after the session ended without disruption to the whole group.
When Jonathan read for the teacher he was very engaged and appeared to be trying his best but when he was asked
to resume independent work he lost focus and frequently had to be prompted to resume working. After Jonathan was
assigned a new computer his work habits improved. Instead of receiving “adequate” comments about effort in the
daily log, Jonathan began receiving “good” and “very good”.
Alice worked dilligently and was very engaged during the intervention, she appeared compliant but anxious about
the intervention. Alice received only “good” or “very good” comments on the teacher’s daily log. Alice was
respectful, motivated and worked steadfastly and quietly. She gained twenty-one CWPM at the cessation of the
intervention.
The preliminary results of the Read Naturally intervention indicate that student attitude, work ethic, and attendance
were more indicative of student success than designated disability. Students with more severe disabilities (Alice and
Ronnie) gained more fluency than students with less severe disabilities (Jonathan and Cory) who were not
motivated, did not attend school regularly, or opted out of work. Paul who missed several days of the intervention
progressed well through the program regardless of his absences. His motivation and work ethic appear to have
surpassed the negative effect of five absences.
In conclusion, the Read Naturally Software Program worked to increase the fluency rates of the students in the
middle school Special Day class. The only caveat being a student who didn’t attend school and refused to finish the
intervention. The next logical course of research is to look at whether or not the gains reported in this study continue
and whether or not student’s loose this skill without this intensive support of continued intervention. Further study
should include a look at the rates of comprehension for the studens involved in this fluency intervention.
References
Hasselbring, T. S. and M. E. Bausch (2006). "Assistive Technologies for Reading." Educational Leadership 63(4):
72-75.Lerner, Matthew, D., Allan, Nicholas, P. and Christopher J. Lonigan (2011) “Assessment of
preschool early literacy skills: linking children’s educational needs with empirically
supported instructional activities.” Psychology in the Schools 48(5): 488-501.
Rasinski, Timothy. Samuels, Jay,E. Hiebert, Elfrieda. Petscher, Yaacov and Karen Feller. "The relationship between
a silent reading fluency instructional protocol on students' reading comprehension and achievement in an
urban school setting." Reading Psychology 32,75-97.
Rupley, William, E., Blair, Timothy, R. and William Nichols. (2009) " Effective reading
instruction for struggling readers: the role of direct/explicit teaching." Reading and
Writing Quarterly 25(2): 125-138.