Addressing the Needs of Struggling Readers
through a Multi-faceted Reading Intervention Program
After spending more than 160 hours working with kids and data, I can tell you that my project is going well,
but it is not bearing the significant fruit I hoped it would in the time I’d
hoped it would take. In essence, I’m
learning that children who have not learned to read at a level that is
commensurate to their grade in school have often, by middle school, lost the
will to progress as readers. This has
created more hiccups in my research than I had dreamed possible. For example, one of the two testing platforms
we are using does not allow for the teacher to discard aberrant scores even
when the teacher is able to determine that the student did poorly out of apathy
or insolence. This happens more often
than I would like to admit, and so many of my students appear, on paper, to be
making less progress than they actually are making. Likewise, the audio book program is one that
many of the students who need it most resist because of the fact that too many
bad experiences color their perspective with regard to reading. Either they have struggled in the past to
pass comprehension tests, or they have never passed a state assessment in
reading, or they have tried and tried only to fail and fail time and time
again. For these reasons, motivation has
become a significant part of my job in this program and an aspect of the action
research that I had not previously believed would be, at times, so
all-consuming. That said, there have
been many children who’ve experienced success in the program and whose
appreciation for it is obvious when looking at the data generated from the
weekly and monthly progress monitoring assessments. Overall, I have great hope that, after a full
school year of implementation, we will be able to sit down this summer and look
at a laundry list of data points that
will describe a picture of a very successful program.
