NORTHCENTRAL UNIVERSITY

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Student: Daniel Alan Coffin

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EDU7101 Dr. Graham

Foundations for Doctoral Study in Supporting a Claim

Education

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Supporting a Claim

Daniel Coffin
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Northcentral University
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Supporting a Claim

Reading fluency is one of the five key components of reading ability and the precursor for

further gains in the area of vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension. While it is assumed

that this competency has been mastered as of the end of elementary schools, many struggling

readers, and particularly those of low socioeconomic status, continue to struggle with fluency into

middle school, putting them at risk of reading failure. The purpose of this assignment is to present

the research-based evidence supporting a recommendation of instructional interventions to develop

reading fluency and comprehension in middle-school students.

Proposal Audience

Since this proposal, if enacted, would need to be both funded by the school administration

and put into practice by the schools Language Arts teachers, this proposal is directed at the schools

Language Arts department chair and faculty as well as the schools principal.

Defining the Problem

Our school struggles to ensure that all of our students not only meet but exceed our highest

expectations for their educational achievement. The most recent NJ Department of Education

Performance Report notes that while our students performance on the NJ PARCC English

Language Arts assessment ranks in the 100th percentile as compared to peers, we are still only in the

44th percentile when ranked statewide (State of New Jersey, 2015). While we have made great

strides in addressing the deficiency of our reading comprehension instruction, we still have a core

group of students who have not demonstrated any growth in reading comprehension. Our students

are assumed to be prepared to read to learn and are being taught accordingly, when in fact, many

of them have yet to learn to read.

A Proposed Solution to the Problem

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My proposal is to supplement the regular Language Arts instruction with targeted instruction

in phonics and fluency in the form of Corrective Reading instruction. The Corrective Reading

program is a rigorously studied program of direction instruction which can be implemented during

specials time to targeted students in lieu of Spanish, Performing Arts, or Fine Arts classes three

times weekly (Przychodzin-Havis, et al, 2005).

Two methods can be used to determine which students should be admitted to the Corrective

Reading program: all students can be tested using the Corrective Reading placement assessment or

we can sort students by RIT scores from the last administration of the MAP assessment and only

screen those students with the Corrective Reading diagnostic who are more than one year behind in

Reading or Language Arts as determined by RIT score. This program will supplement existing

teaching in reading comprehension with additional directed instruction in phonics and reading

fluency, helping these students to better understand what they are reading and how to make sense of

it (Yan & Wilkerson, 2014).

Advantages and Disadvantages of the Proposed Solution

The Corrective Reading program is one that has been rigorously tested at grade levels 4-12

and has been shown to lead to significant gains in decoding accuracy and speed which should, in

turn, lead to gains in reading comprehension as well (Przychodzin-Havis et al, 2005). The

Corrective Reading program provides support to teachers in the form of scripted lessons and

additional resources, giving teachers a better understanding of why this instruction is being

delivered when those without a literacy education background might not know (Yan & Wilkerson,

2014). Teachers, while checking out individual students in their oral reading fluency development,

can further support reading growth by instituting Scaffolded Silent Reading as an adjunct to the

Corrective Reading program. During this time, students will build up their silent reading stamina

with timed practice and support in selecting silent reading practice texts (Reutzel & Juth, 2014).
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The addition of a silent reading fluency component to Corrective Reading will help bridge the gap

between the Corrective Reading and regular Language Arts curricula (wherein one is primarily

expected to read out loud and one is primarily expected to read silently, respectively).

There are some disadvantages to this program: namely, that the program costs a significant

amount of money to get started. This is money that could go toward purchasing additional texts for

students to read or hiring additional qualified staff to lower class sizes. That having been said, a

cost-effectiveness study found that the Corrective Reading program, once fully implemented over a

period of two to three years, would be a more cost-effective option than the next leading competitor,

the Wilson Reading System (which tends to focus on alphabetics as opposed to fluency) (Hollands

et al, 2015). Furthermore, students who have problems decoding fluently are students who will have

problems comprehending and thus, have problems reading at all. It would make more sense to

spend that money on getting students reading at grade level than providing them with books which

they will not (or cannot) read.

Conclusion

Our school, and others sharing the same socioeconomic makeup, face a serious problem: we

have readers who, though they have reached the middle years of instruction, have not mastered

those skills of decoding which would make them fluent readers and ready to make the most of

comprehension instruction. Rather than dumb down the content of the instruction in the regular

Language Arts classroom, we should use the flexibility afforded us by our specials programming to

offer these students supplemental instruction in fluency and decoding which should better equip our

students to better make use of our existing instruction.

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References

Hollands, F.M., Kieffer, M.J., Shand, R., Pan, Y., Cheng, H., & Levin, H.M. (2015). Cost-

effectiveness analysis of early reading programs: A demonstration with recommendations

for future research. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 9(1), 30-53.

Przychodzin-Havis, A.M., Marchand-Martella, N.E., Martella, R.C., Miller, D.A., Warner, L.,

Leonard, B., & Chapman, S. (2005). An analysis of corrective reading research. Journal

of Direct Instruction, 5(1), 37-65.

Reutzel, D. R., & Juth, S. (2014). Supporting the development of silent reading fluency: An

evidence-based framework for the intermediate grades (3-6). International Electronic

Journal of Elementary Education, 7(1), 27-46.

Yan, M., & Wilkerson, K.L. (2014). Teacher-reported use of reading instructional approaches in

juvenile correctional facilities. The Journal of Correctional Education, 65(1), 27-49.