Feb 19th ~ The Bowers debate continues; The summer reading effect; Fluency interventions for struggling readers; Dosage in reading fluency interventions
The Weekly Email That Keeps You Informed of The Latest Reading Research!
Welcome to the Reading Research Recap, a weekly newsletter featuring the latest reading research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The goal of the Recap is to share recent scientific findings and foster an appreciation of science as a way to navigate the world. I try to make this one of the most informative emails you get each week. If you enjoy this issue, please share it. I am always interested in improving the newsletter and welcome feedback.
Welcome! This is Issue No. 39
“Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction – in short, between and old today and a new tomorrow.” — Henrich Rohrer
Updates 👇🏼
📚📈📊
Attention Reading Researchers…
Our decoding measure validation paper was finally assigned an issue! You can read the full paper here. If you are a researcher interesting in using the measure to equate passages or measure sub-lexical variables please reach out to me. You can reply to this email and it goes only to me- right to my gmail inbox. We have a full web-based, automatic scoring interface, similar to Coh-metrix where you can paste in text and get scores:
What Data Can I Get?
You can get DSyM word scores
You can get passage median or mean scores
You can get sub-lexical features such as the number of blends, number of letters, number of phonemes
Or the number of certain types of Grapheme-phoneme correspondences in a text
we also have word frequency within that specific passage
Or, you can create a custom formula of your own design.
It spits it out as a downloadable excel file. There are still minor bugs (this is still beta version), but we have developed creative workarounds.
What Can I Do With the DSyM?
The DSyM scoring platform has been used in previous published research
to examine different decoding demands of 1st grade CBM ORF probes (something you will hear more about in the next few months- since this was chapter 1 of my dissertation!).
Upcoming Conference
Click here for more information on the first annual Speech, Language, & Learning Interventions Research Symposium (SLLIVRS)!
Research Highlights
📉📊📈📑📝
This debate is raging on…
Here is the full “debate” (in case you are just joining now)…
Bowers published this article about a year ago (open access)
Buckingham made this rebuttal to the article (I think this might be an open access version of it).
Fletcher, Savage, and Vaughn also made a rebuttal (short/summarized version here).
Then, Bowers et al. made a rebuttal to Buckingham’s rebuttal
and Bowers et al. made a rebuttal to Fletcher et al.’s rebuttal
I hope I have this all correct…but I could be missing some parts or other rebuttals…let me know!
Examining the Reading and Cognitive Profiles of Students With Significant Reading Comprehension Difficulties
“Three latent profiles emerged: (a) moderate deficits in both WR and LC of similar severity (91%), (b) severe deficit in WR paired with moderate LC deficit (5%), and (c) severe deficit in LC with moderate WR difficulties (4%). Analyses examining the associations between cognitive attributes and group membership indicated students with lower performance on cognitive predictors were more likely to be in a severe subgroup.”
Does CBM maze assess reading comprehension in 8-9-year olds at-risk for dyslexia?
“We found that language comprehension contributed additional variance beyond decoding (fluency and accuracy measures) to reading comprehension as assessed by the WIAT‐III, but that decoding explained the most variance in children's performance on the CBM Maze task (vis à vis the simple view of reading).”
Attention‐driven read‐aloud technology increases reading comprehension in children with reading disabilities
“A better integration between audio and visual text information can support reading comprehension in children with dyslexia…Gaze‐regulated read‐aloud tools are a promising approach for supporting struggle readers.”
Action Video Games Enhance Attentional Control and Phonological Decoding in Children with Developmental Dyslexia (open access)
“Crucially, attentional control and phonological decoding speed were increased only in DD children whose video game score was highly efficient after the AVG training. We demonstrated that only an efficient AVG training induces a plasticity of the fronto-parietal attentional control linked to a selective phonological decoding improvement in children with DD.”
Automaticity as an independent trait in predicting reading outcomes in middle-school.
“Decoding was uniquely predicted by knowledge (unmasked performance), whereas fluency was uniquely predicted by automaticity (masked performance). Automaticity was stable across two testing points. Thus, automaticity should be considered an individually reliable marker/reading trait that uniquely predicts some skills in average to struggling middle-school students.”
Do We ‘Laugh’ or ‘La8gh’? Early Print Knowledge and Its Relation to Learning to Read in English and French
“These results suggest that print knowledge can be used to predict progress in second language word reading in emergent bilingual children.”
I anticipate this one being a bit controversial, and I am curious to see if future research comes to the same conclusion.
Exploring the summer reading effect through visual analysis of multiple datasets
“Visual analysis of the datasets suggested that summer breaks were not associated with systematic losses of students' reading ability, even among those considered most vulnerable to the phenomenon. However, available assessments and benchmarks are not designed to measure summer learning specifically, and little is known about the kinds of literacy experiences students not in formal programmes might be having. Thus, more research on summer maturation and degeneration is warranted.”
Deeper Dive
Fluency Interventions for Struggling Readers in Grades 6 to 12: A Research Synthesis
In-Depth
This section was covered by DeAnne Hunter!
Maki, K. E., Hammerschmidt-Snidarich, S. M., Vernon-Feagans, L. (2021, February 11-12). Conceptualizations of dosage in reading fluency intervention and implications for research and practice [Conference panel presentation]. Pacific Coast Research Conference 2021, Online, United States. https://vkc.vumc.org/vkc/pcrc/VirtualPCRC.
Foreword
Hi all! I (DeAnne) had the opportunity to attend the Pacific Coast Research Conference this past weekend and learned about lots of cool new research. I decided to share one of my favorite talks that I heard which discusses important issues related to dosage in reading fluency intervention. I hope you enjoy!
Background
This focused on the practical implementation of fluency intervention with a focus on the role of dosage.
What is meant by dosage?
Definition 1: The amount of time spent in the intervention. This can refer to the amount of time spent actually reading, or just the amount of time spent receiving the intervention.
Definition 2: The number of words that students read during the intervention.
The way that dosage is understood has implications for readers at different levels. For students who are struggling, spending ten minutes reading will result in fewer words being read compared to stronger readers.
The impact of this disparity in the number of words read is encompassed in what is referred to as The Matthew Effect, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (for more on this, you can watch Dr. Keith Stanovich's discussion of this principle here: Dr. Keith Stanovich: Matthew Effects - Does Reading Make you Smarter?)
Practice is essential for developing reading fluency. Previous work by Dr. Hammerschmidt-Snidarich and colleagues in 2019 found no significant differences in the improvement of fluency in a reading intervention which determined intervention dosage based upon the number of words read as opposed to the time spent reading (you can find this article freely available here). This suggests that when an intervention is designed, considerations which allow equal opportunities for practice across students is a critical consideration.
Rationale
These researchers compiled a research synthesis (or meta-analysis) of reading fluency interventions to examine the role of differing definitions of dosage across studies.
They looked specifically at:
The effects of reading fluency interventions on oral reading fluency (ORF)
Different definitions and operationalizations of dosage
The unique impact of dosage of oral reading fluency
Methods
This study synthesized research on fluency interventions. All articles were found using Academic Search Premier.
Search Terms Used
Continuous reading
Duet reading
Reading fluency
Reading intervention
Repeated reading
Silent reading
Supported cloze
Sustained silent reading
Wide reading
Narrowing the Search
Article Criteria
Peer-reviewed, in English
Examined the effectiveness of reading fluency intervention
K-12 students (general, special-education or a combination)
Pre- and Posttests included WRCM (words read correct per minute), or that this value could be calculated
Psychometric information available for measures
Experimental design or single case design to examine fluency growth
Effect sizes reported or could be calculated for experimental studies
Quantitative changes in reading fluency reported in single case designs
Dosage information was provided
e.g., minutes of intervention, number of timed readings, number of readings generally, sessions per week, weeks of intervention, minutes spent reading, words read
Excluded multicomponent interventions
Variables
Intervention type
Intervention dosage
Study method
Participant information
Study outcomes
Methodological rigor
Analysis Procedures
Meta-analytic
Overall intervention effects
Potential moderating variables (variables not changed by the intervention but which could impact results, e.g. socioeconomic status)
Synthesis
Intervention dosage reporting practices
Effects of dosage & other variables on fluency growth
Results
Overall, reading interventions were found to be effective - no shock here. More important is breaking this down by intervention type:
Small Effect
Medium Effect
Continuous / Wide Reading
Peer Assisted Learning Strategies
Partner Reading
Repeated Reading
Supported Cloze
Researcher-Created Intervention / Other
* None of the interventions reviewed reported large effect sizes
But let's focus on dosage, since this is the primary point of interest for this talk. When dosage is defined in intervention studies, it is almost always defined in terms of time.
More importantly, most of these studies only reported the total time students spent receiving the intervention, not the amount of time spent reading. None of the studies reviewed directly looked at the impact of dosage on oral reading fluency.
Key Takeaways
While the amount of time spent reading is important, results from Hammerschmidt-Snidarich and colleagues in 2019 support the crucial role of the number of words read when intervening to improve reading fluency.
This research synthesis shows that there is a fairly large gap in the research regarding what we know about the role of words read in fluency interventions, and more importantly that dosage is not always reported specifically and systematically.
What this means for educators and practitioners is to pay attention to dosage, both how and to what extent it is reported, when evaluating an intervention for implementation. Equal time does not entail equal practice for all readers!