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Abstract
This study measured the effectiveness of various instructional approaches on the reading outcomes of 198 adults who read single words at the 3.0 through 5.9 grade equivalency levels. The students were randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: Decoding and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, Fluency, and Extensive Reading; Extensive Reading; and a Control/Comparison approach. The Control/Comparison approach employed a curriculum common to community-based adult literacy programs, and the Extensive Reading approach focused on wide exposure to literature. The Fluency component was a guided repeated oral reading approach, and the Decoding/Comprehension components were SRA/McGraw-Hill Direct Instruction Corrective Reading Programs. Results indicated continued weaknesses in and poor integration of participants’ skills. Although students made significant gains independent of reading instruction group, all improvements were associated with small effect sizes. When reading instruction group was considered, only one significant finding was detected, with the Comparison/Control group, the Decoding and Fluency group, and the Decoding, Comprehension, Extensive Reading, and Fluency group showing stronger word attack outcomes than the Extensive Reading group.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research in this study was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute for Literacy, and the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education—grant # R01 HD43801.
Notes
In addition to the MANCOVA analyses, three-level HLM analyses were conducted for each of the four subtests of the WJ; participant scores nested in time, nested in instructional group, nested in reading instruction approach. No significant (p < .05) Level-3 predictors were found.
