Response to Intervention Reading Interventions to Promote Fluency & Comprehension Jim Wright

Response to Intervention

www.interventioncentral.org

Reading Interventions toPromote Fluency & Comprehension

Jim Wrightwww.interventioncentral.org


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Savvy Teacher’s Guide: Reading

Interventions That Work

(Wright, 2000)



Big Ideas in Beginning Reading• “Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate

sounds in words. • Alphabetic Principle: The ability to associate sounds with letters

and use these sounds to form words. • Fluency with Text: The effortless, automatic ability to read words

in connected text. • Vocabulary: The ability to understand (receptive) and use

(expressive) words to acquire and convey meaning. • Comprehension: The complex cognitive process involving the

intentional interaction between reader and text to convey meaning.”

Source: Big ideas in beginning reading. University of Oregon. Retrieved September 23, 2007, from http://reading.uoregon.edu/index.php



Building Reading Fluency



CBM Student Reading Samples: What Difference Does Fluency Make?

• 3rd Grade: 19 Words Per Minute





Reading Decoding

‘…Of course, when children cannot decode at all, there is little chance of comprehension. When they can decode but it requires a considerable effort, decoding competes with comprehension efforts for the limited capacity available for processing of text…so that effortful decoding consumes capacity that might otherwise be used to understand text.’

- Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997



NRP Conclusions Regarding Importance of Oral Reading Fluency:

“An extensive review of the literature indicates that classroom practices that encourage repeated oral reading with feedback and guidance leads to meaningful improvements in reading expertise for students—for good readers as well as those who are experiencing difficulties.”-p. 3-3



• Assisted Reading Practice• Listening Passage Preview

(‘ListeningWhile Reading’)

• Paired Reading • Repeated Reading

Interventions for…Increasing Reading Fluency



Paired Reading (p.17)

The student reads aloud in tandem with an accomplished reader. At a student signal, the helping reader stops reading, while the student continues on. When the student commits a reading error, the helping reader resumes reading in tandem.





Building Reading Comprehension



‘Student Reader’ ActivityIn your ‘elbow groups’:

Identify the 2-3 most frequent or important ‘comprehension blockers’ that youhave observed in the population of ‘difficult-to-teach’ students with whom you work. (Review the ‘Reading ComprehensionChecklist as a reference if needed.)

Be prepared to share your selections with the larger group.



Processing Before Reading (Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997)

• Good readers– have clear goals in mind before reading– overview the text before reading to:

• determine whether text is worth reading• identify sections that may be most relevant• Create a ‘reading plan’



Processing During Reading (Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997)

• Good readers– pay ‘differential’ attention to information

that pertains to their goals– may jump back and forth in the text to clarify

confusion, review specific information– anticipate what will come next in the text and updare

their predictions based on new information– make inferences based on reading– ‘demonstrate passion’ for their reading



Processing After Reading (Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997)

• Good readers– may reread or ‘reskim’ the text just read– may take notes on text or attempt to restate

main ideas– continue to think about and reflect on text once they

are done reading



• ‘Click or Clunk?’ Self-Check• Keywords: A Memorization Strategy• Main Idea Maps• Mental Imagery: Improving Text Recall• Oral Recitation Lesson• Prior Knowledge: Activating the ‘Known’• Question-Generation• Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Comprehension Package• Story Map• Text Lookback

Comprehension Interventions That Rely on ‘Gist’ Sentences



Create a ‘gist’ sentence for this passage…

‘…when skilled readers read, they implicitly parse the text into micropropositions, the smallest units of meaning that can be conceived as verbs or prepositions as well as semantic roles that are related by the verbs or prepositions. All of the micropropositions specified in a text combine to capture the full meaning of the text. Of course, no one remembers every idea specified in a text. What people remember is the gist-the main idea of the text.’- Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997



‘Click or Clunk’ Self-Check

(p.25)

Students periodically check their understanding of sentences, paragraphs, and pages of text as they read. When students encounter problems with vocabulary or comprehension, they use a checklist to apply simple strategies to solve those reading difficulties.



‘Click or Clunk’ Check Sheet



‘…The combination of lack of practice, deficient decoding skills, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading related activities. Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the less skilled readers delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word-metacognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to higher-level process of text integration and comprehension.’- Stanovich, K., (1986)




‘Click or Clunk?’ Example





Keywords: A Memorization

Strategy (p.28)

Students select the central idea of a passage and summarize it as a ‘keyword’. Next, they recode the keyword as a mental picture and use additional mental imagery to relate other important facts to the keyword. They can then recall the keyword when needed, retrieving the related information.



Using ‘Keywords’:

Student Strategy Sheet



Keyword Strategy

The keyword strategy includes these steps:• highlight important facts or ideas in a passage • write a "gist" sentence that summarizes the highlighted

ideas or facts • select a 'keyword' that will help them to recall a central

idea about the article or passage. • create a mental picture to remember the keyword, and

then • add details to the mental picture or create a story

around the keyword to memorize additional facts or ideas.



Mental Imagery: Improving Text

Recall (p.36)

By constructing “mental pictures” of what they are reading and closely studying text illustrations, students increase their reading comprehension.



Prior Knowledge: Activating the

‘Known’ (p.40)

Through a series of guided questions, the instructor helps students activate their prior knowledge of a specific topic to help them comprehend the content of a story or article on the same topic. Linking new facts to prior knowledge increases a student’s inferential comprehension (ability to place novel information in a meaningful context by comparing it to already-learned information).



Activating Prior Knowledge:

Student Exercise



QuestionGeneration

(p.44)

Students are taught to boost their comprehension of expository passages by (1) locating the main idea or key ideas in the passage and (2) generating questions based on that information.



Question Generation: StepsIntroduce this strategy to the class:

• Locating Explicit Main Idea: Using examples of passages with explicit main ideas, train students to identify and underline main-idea sentences.

• Finding Key Facts. In some passages, the main idea is implied rather than explicitly stated. Readers must first identify the key facts or ideas of the passage before they can summarize the passage's main idea. Using examples of passages with implied main ideas, locate and circle key facts or ideas. Describe to students how you distinguished this central information from less important details.

• Writing a "Gist" Sentence. Show students a passage with an implied main idea. Circle all key ideas or facts. Demonstrate how to write a "gist" sentence (one that is built from the identified key ideas and summarizes the paragraph's main idea). Emphasize that the reader may have link information from different sections of the passage to build a gist sentence.

• Generating Questions. Tell students that careful readers often construct questions about what they are reading to help them learn. Put up a list of 'signal words' that can be used as question-starters: e.g., who, what, where, when, why, how. Using sample passages, show students how to convert explicit main-idea sentences or reader-created "gist" sentences into questions.



Tier I Reading Interventions Activity

• Select an intervention topic of interest.

• Select the TOP idea from your reading that you feel should be on every teacher’s ‘Tier I’ intervention list at your school.

• Be prepared to share your results





Interventions: Potential ‘Fatal Flaws’Any intervention must include 4 essential elements. The absence of any one of the elements would be considered a ‘fatal flaw’ (Witt, VanDerHeyden & Gilbertson, 2004) that blocks the school from drawing meaningful conclusions from the student’s response to the intervention:

1. Clearly defined problem. The student’s target concern is stated in specific, observable, measureable terms. This ‘problem identification statement’ is the most important step of the problem-solving model (Bergan, 1995), as a clearly defined problem allows the teacher or RTI Team to select a well-matched intervention to address it.

2. Baseline data. The teacher or RTI Team measures the student’s academic skills in the target concern (e.g., reading fluency, math computation) prior to beginning the intervention. Baseline data becomes the point of comparison throughout the intervention to help the school to determine whether that intervention is effective.

3. Performance goal. The teacher or RTI Team sets a specific, data-based goal for student improvement during the intervention and a checkpoint date by which the goal should be attained.

4. Progress-monitoring plan. The teacher or RTI Team collects student data regularly to determine whether the student is on-track to reach the performance goal.

Source: Witt, J. C., VanDerHeyden, A. M., & Gilbertson, D. (2004). Troubleshooting behavioral interventions. A systematic process for finding and eliminating problems. School Psychology Review, 33, 363-383.





Reading Interventions Activity: Complete a Tier 1 Intervention Plan

• Fill out the Tier 1 intervention plan for a student (hypothetical or real), using the intervention that you selected in the previous activity.

• Be prepared to discuss from the classroom teacher’s perspective how user-friendly the Tier 1 documentation requirement is.

• What support(s) would the classroom teacher need to be able to fill out these Tier 1 plans?



Reading Interventions Activity: Homework for 3 June 2010

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Documents

Response to Intervention Reading Interventions to Promote Fluency & Comprehension Jim Wright