Effects of two reading interventions with small-groups of second grade English Language Learners on fluency and comprehension

Abstract

The study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the HELPS-SG curriculum and a small group repeated reading (RR) intervention on oral reading fluency and comprehension. The participants of this study were 42 second-grade ELL's who attended an elementary school in the southwestern United States. The participants were either a part of a RR intervention or the HELPS curriculum in a small group of students who were randomly assigned to a condition. Student's oral reading fluency (ORF), operationally defined as Correct Words per Minute (CWPM), was the targeted behavior. Woodcock-Johnson Comprehension and ORF growth were examined with a pre- and post-test, while the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) was used to track reading growth across sessions. The study used a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) to test for between groups, within groups, and the interaction effects while controlling for violations of sphericity. Visual analysis was used to determine intervention effects for DIBELS effectiveness and efficiency. There was no statistical significance between the HELPS and RR intervention, although both groups grew over time. Through descriptive analysis of the pre- and post-test data and visual analyses, the RR intervention appeared to result in more improvement overall and took less time to implement. The RR intervention group improved on all three post-test, while the HELPS intervention group did not improve on one post-test. The RR intervention also took less time to implement and less cumulative number of instructional minutes. Overall, even though there was no significance between the groups, the RR intervention group involved fewer steps and was faster to implement, and was therefore determined to be favored over the HELPS-SG program.