Effective Interventions for Building Reading Fluency with Elementary Students with Learning Disabilities

Fluent reading, often defined as speed and accuracy, is an important skill for all readers to develop. Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently, leading to difficulties in reading comprehension. Despite recent attention to reading fluency and ways to improve fluency, it is not clear which features of interventions that are designed to enhance fluency are beneficial for the most struggling readers. The purpose of this study is to synthesize research on interventions that are designed primarily to build reading flu-ency for students with LD. The search yielded 24 published and unpublished studies that reported findings on intervention features, in-cluding repeated reading with and without a model, sustained reading, number of repetitions, text difficulty, and specific improvement criteria. Our findings suggest that effective interventions for building fluency include an explicit model of fluent reading, multiple op-portunities to repeatedly read familiar text independently and with corrective feedback, and established performance criteria for in-creasing text difficulty. The development of reading flu-ency has been linked to success-ful reading since the early re-search on the psychology of reading. In his classic review of 19th-century read-ing research, Huey (1908) likened the development of fluent reading to th