Using Moderator Analysis to Identify the First-Grade Children Who Benefit More and Less From a Reading Comprehension Program: A Step Toward Aptitude-by-Treatment Interaction

Abstract

Because of the importance of teaching reading comprehension to struggling young readers and the infrequency with which it has been implemented and evaluated, we designed a comprehensive first-grade reading comprehension program. We conducted a component analysis of the program’s decoding/fluency (DF) and reading comprehension (COMP) dimensions, creating DF and DF+COMP treatments to parse the value of COMP. Students (N = 125) were randomly assigned to the 2 active treatments and controls. Treatment children were tutored 3 times per week for 21 weeks in 45-min sessions. Children in DF and DF+COMP together performed more strongly than controls on word reading and comprehension. However, pretreatment word reading appeared to moderate these results such that children with weaker beginning word reading across the treatments outperformed similarly low-performing controls to a significantly greater extent than treatment children with stronger beginning word reading outperformed comparable controls. DF+COMP children did not perform better than DF children. Study limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed.

Is “Response/No Response” Too Simple a Notion for RTI Frameworks? Exploring Multiple Response Types With Latent Profile Analysis

“…Coyne et al (2019) and Vaughn et al (2019) determined that stronger initial reading and language skills predicted a more positive response. However, Clemens et al (2019) and D. Fuchs et al (2019) obtained an opposite result: Weaker initial skills predicted more positive responses.…”

“…Both treatments were delivered one-to-one, three times per week, 45 min per session, for 21 weeks, totaling 47.25 hr of instruction (45 min per session × 63 sessions). Fidelity of treatment implementation was measured by direct observation at multiple time points and was found to be consistently strong (>90%; see D. Fuchs et al, 2019, for a description of tutor training and documentation of treatment fidelity).…”

“…Several research groups have found domain-specific skills (e.g., decoding) predictive of intervention response (Clemens et al, 2019; Coyne et al, 2019; D. Fuchs et al, 2019; Nelson et al, 2003; Scarborough, 1998; Vaughn et al, 2019).…”

“…In the current study, we used a latent profile model based on word-reading performance at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 1-year follow up (with the control group serving as a local norm at each time point) to pursue two related objectives: first, to determine whether there were multiple response types in a treatment group of 265 at-risk first-grade readers who generally benefited from an empirically-validated reading program (D. Fuchs et al, 2019); second, whether pretreatment domain-general skills (working memory, non-verbal reasoning) and domain-specific skills (letter knowledge, decoding, passage comprehension, and language) differentiated among the types of response.…”

Supplementing teacher knowledge using web‐based Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy to improve content area reading comprehension with fourth‐ and fifth‐grade struggling readers

“…As this study focused on struggling readers, the study sample included all participating students who scored below the 25th percentile on the pretest of the standardized Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT; Wiederholt & Blalock, ). We opted to use the 25th percentile because many research projects have used that cut‐off (e.g., Eason, Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, ; Etmanskie, Partanen, & Siegel, ; Fuchs et al, ; Rønberg & Petersen, ; Shapiro et al, ) or the 30th percentile (Wanzek et al, ) for identifying struggling readers to receive interventions. The GSRT was used to select students because it is a standardized reading test with sound psychometric properties.…”