How parents can help their children with reading: the effectiveness of a home repeated reading intervention

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston UniversityPLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you.The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a home repeated-reading intervention on the reading achievement of eight low-performing second-grade children in an urban school by taking into consideration their need to develop automaticity and the role their parents play in this process. Specifically I posed the following questions: Does participation in a home repeated reading intervention (a) improve children's reading accuracy, (b) improve children's reading fluency, and (c) improve children's reading skills on an independent reading task? When parents participate in a home repeated reading intervention (a) what word-study strategies do they use to support their children's reading, and (b) how do the strategies they use influence children's subsequent word errors? Participants were identified as the lowest-performing readers in their classrooms. Three children were born outside of the United States and were speakers of English as a second language, and two were receiving special education services. The eight children participated in the intervention with their parents. A multiple-baseline across-subjects design and a pre-post design were used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention. Results indicated that all participants made substantially fewer reading errors during the intervention as compared to their performance on baseline stories. All participants demonstrated decreased error rates from the first to the last reading of stories, and significant fluency gains were evident in all cases when comparing mean baseline fluency with mean intervention fluency for all participants. All participants made considerable gains in fluency from the first to the last reading of each story, and all children improved on an independent reading measure. Parents who participated with their children monitored their children's home reading. Four parents provided substantial word-level support, and the children who received this support made fewer repeated reading errors. The children's advances in accuracy, fluency, and transfer to new materials can be taken as evidence that repeated reading provided an effective way for these parents to help their children to achieve higher levels of reading performance. The small sample size prevents generalizability to broader populations, however, the strength of the participants' performance suggests potential for positive outcomes in future studies.2031-01-0