The effect of a warming up to fluency intervention on second-grade students' reading

Advisors: Elizabeth Wilkins; Thomas Smith.Committee members: Laurie Elish-Piper.This research study investigated the effectiveness of a warming up to fluency intervention on the student reading outcomes of words per minute, errors, prosody, and overall reading level as measured by AIMSweb, the Multidimensional Fluency Rubric, and the Developmental Reading Assessment 2 (DRA2). A total of 34 second grade students participated: 17 in the intervention group and 16 in the comparison group. The students were one-to-one matched based on DRA2 reading scores. Students in the intervention group received the intervention Monday through Friday for 18 weeks.A repeated measures ANOVA was completed on all of the above outcomes with no significant group differences. Exploratory analyses of gender across time on all outcomes did produce significant differences for males in the opposite direction. Exploratory analyses using age as a covariate did not produce significant findings on any of the four outcomes. Implications include meaningful fluency intervention and progress monitoring. Recommendations include parental and involvement school team involvement, implementation of the intervention with integrity, and warming up of students prior to the AIMSweb assessment.Ed.D. (Doctor of Education