Reading intervention is one part of a school’s federally mandated Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). It targets five core aspects of reading.
These include phonological awareness, meaning students learn rhyming and individual sounds. They also build morphological awareness by learning prefixes, suffixes and roots.
Group Reading Intervention
Students who struggle with reading require intensive support. Individual reading interventions allow teachers to address a student’s specific needs one-on-one. This personalized instruction has a powerful impact on students’ progress and can make a significant difference in their grades.
This group focuses on teaching students the necessary skills to become fluent readers, including reading rate, expression, and phrasing. Students can practice their decoding and comprehension skills using texts that are appropriate for their skill level.
According to a recent study, small groups that target a single skill area have higher effectiveness than broad-based groups. The research found that students whose instructors use ability-based groups in kindergarten through 3rd grade have worse reading scores than those who were taught without ability grouping. In addition, researchers have found that ability-based reading groups reinforce social hierarchies in the classroom. This can negatively affect the social development of boys, migrant children, and other vulnerable populations. By limiting labels, educators can avoid these harmful effects.
Individual Intervention
A range of research suggests that students whose reading difficulties are not being met by classroom instruction require supplemental, intensive and personalized intervention to improve their skills. Adolescents with severe problems often need this individualized support, especially to gain the necessary reading fluency and comprehension strategies needed for grade-level performance.
Individual interventions allow teachers to provide highly customized instruction that matches students’ learning needs. This allows them to better monitor and address student challenges, which leads to improved reading outcomes.
Research also shows that students need a lot of time to improve their reading abilities, and independent reading (IR) experiences are important. However, making IR time contingent on work completion can undermine students’ reading performance; poor readers may not complete their assigned reading tasks and thus miss out on critical IR experiences.
Picture-Based Comprehension Program
Picture comprehension is a fun and easy way to improve comprehension skills. It requires students to pause and observe a picture, then respond to questions that focus on the who, what, where, when, and why. This is a great way to build children’s confidence and prepare them for more complex texts.
Research has shown that mental imagery is a key component of reading comprehension. Children who have higher levels of mental imagery are better able to build a mental model that connects words and pictures to understand a story. (Kouwenberg, 2013)
Students from Fort Smith Public Schools who received Lindamood-Bell instruction showed large standard score gains in reading comprehension. Watch educators from this district discuss how their students gained success with this approach. Students who receive visualizing and verbalizing instruction also show a dramatic improvement in comprehension. This teaching strategy develops concept imagery, which may be the foundation of higher level thinking and reading comprehension.
Text-Based Comprehension Program
Many struggling adolescent readers have no trouble reading words correctly, but are unable to make sense of the information and ideas they read. For example, a student may struggle with reading a science text about the human body even though they can understand and read Shakespeare.
One solution for students who struggle with reading comprehension is to teach them higher-level comprehension strategies that allow them to connect the new information they read with what they already know. These higher level processes include previewing (identifying what will help them understand the new text), generating main idea statements and summarizing through text-based discussions, and integrating information across multiple texts. In the study mentioned above, MCPER researchers found that teaching these higher-level comprehension strategies improved proximal measures such as Woodcock Johnson-III Oral Comprehension and Passage Comprehension measures. Adding instruction in key word and main idea instruction further enhanced this effect, as compared to the business-as-usual control group. In this study, students received 40 minutes of small group instruction four times a week for eight weeks. They were taught using semi-scripted lessons and grade-level science texts that focused on four, two-week thematic units (natural disasters, ecosystems, human body systems, and space exploration).