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Running head: INSTRUCTIONAL LEVEL FOR READING INTERVENTIONS
Using the Instructional Level as a Criterion to Target
Reading Interventions
Matthew K. Burns David C. Parker
Minnesota Center for Reading Research
University of Minnesota
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Abstract
The instructional hierarchy offers a useful framework to target academic interventions. Within
this framework, the accuracy with which a student reads might function as an indicator that the
student should receive an intervention that focuses either on accuracy or fluency. The current
study examined whether the instructional level for reading (93% to 97% of words read correctly)
could be used to target interventions that first facilitated accurate responding, and subsequently
facilitated faster rates of fluency growth. Each of three third-grade students had faster growth
rates in the second phase of a fluency-focused reading intervention following an intervention that
resulted in the students reading at least 93% of the words correctly. Implications and limitations
of the current study are discussed for applying the instructional hierarchy and the instructional
level to target reading interventions.
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Using the Instructional Level as a Criterion to Target Reading Interventions
Recent research has led to a better understanding of effective interventions (Burns &
Ysseldyke, 2009) and assessment technology that can directly test potential interventions (Daly,
Martens, Dool & Hintze, 1998; Jones & Wickstrom, 2002). However, even a well-researched
intervention will not be effective if it does not address the core problem. The instructional
hierarchy has become a commonly-used framework for intervention design (Ardoin & Daly,
2007) in which interventions are identified by matching student skill with one of four phases of
student learning (Haring & Eaton, 1978). Although the hierarchy was proposed over 30 years
ago, it was not used for intervention research until Daly, Lentz, and Boyer (1996) discussed it as
a conceptual model for better understanding reading interventions. Moreover, the instructional
hierarchy could provide a potential tool for correctly targeting reading interventions (Burns,
VanDerHeyden, & Boice, 2008).
According to Haring and Eaton (1978), acquisition of new skills is the first phase of the
instructional hierarchy and is characterized by slow and inaccurate performance. A student in the
acquisition phase would require high modeling and immediate feedback. After a student
becomes accurate, she is operating in the proficiency phase and would likely respond to
repetition and over-learning procedures to perform the skill more quickly. Once the student
performs the skill with accuracy and sufficient speed, she then can generalize the newly learned
information to different settings (phase three – generalization) and can apply it to different
situations to solve problems (phase four – adaption). The accuracy with which the task is
completed is a relevant variable in the instructional hierarchy because two students with similar
speed of responding may require different interventions based on their respective levels of
accuracy. A student with low accuracy would need an intervention that targets accurate
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responding, but a student with high accuracy would need an intervention that targets speed of
correct responding.
Although Haring and Eaton (1978) make clear that the focus of acquisition interventions
should be increasing accuracy, they do not discuss what level of accuracy determines when a
student has progressed to the proficiency phase. The instructional level could serve as a potential
criterion to switch reading intervention focus from acquisition to proficiency. Gickling and
Thompson (1985) operationally defined Bett’s (1946) concept of an instructional level for
reading by proposing that students were optimally challenged when they read 93% to 97% of the
words correctly. Reading interventionists use the instructional level to assess the accuracy with
which a skill is completed and compare that level (as determined by the percentage of items
correctly completed) to an instructional level criterion of 93% to 97% known words. Students
who read fewer than 93% of the words correctly from contextual reading are operating at a
frustration level and those who read more than 97% correct are at an independent level. When
students read at the instructional level, they experience several positive outcomes, such as
enhanced reading fluency (Burns, 2007), comprehension (Gickling & Armstrong, 1978), and
time on task (Burns & Dean, 2005; Gickling & Armstrong, 1978; Treptow et al., 2007).
Previous instructional level intervention research focused on reading fluency, which is
often used as a target in reading intervention studies. The terms fluency and proficiency require
clear differentiation when applying the instructional hierarchy to reading as an intervention
heuristic. The National Reading Panel (2000) has identified five broad subskills possessed by
skilled readers. Of these, reading fluency, or the ability to read text quickly and accurately with
good expression, is a key subskill that often requires intervention as reading first develops. In
this sense, reading fluency refers specifically to the skill of accurately and rapidly decoding
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written text. Proficiency refers to the general ability to perform a skill accurately and rapidly and
to the specific stage of the instructional hierarchy.
Reading fluency appears to be an appropriate target for reading interventions because it
can be measured reliably and sensitively with curriculum-based measurement of oral reading
fluency (CBM-R; Deno, 1985) and is a strong indicator of total reading competence (Fuchs,
Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). There is a moderate to large correlation between CBM-R data
and comprehension (Berninger, Abbot, Vermeulen, & Fulton, 2006; Burns et al., 2002; Jenkins,
Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003; Samuels, 1979), with unique variance being
attributed to CBM-R (Spear-Swerling, 2006). Moreover, previous research has effectively used
reading fluency interventions to increase reading comprehension (Alber-Morgan, Ramp,
Anderson, & Martin, 2007; Burns, Dean, & Foley, 2004; Freeland, Skinner, Jackson, McDaniel,
& Smith, 2000).
There are a large number of research-based interventions that directly address oral
reading fluency deficits (National Reading Panel, 2000). Two commonly-used approaches to
reading fluency interventions are repeated reading (RR; Moyer, 1982; Rashotte & Torgeson,
1985; Samuels, 1979) and the supported cloze procedure (SCP; Rasinski, 2003). According to
Samuels (1979), repeated reading ―consists of re-reading a short and meaningful passage until a
satisfactory level of fluency is reached‖ (p. 404). Thus, students receiving a repeated reading
intervention engage in high amounts of practice with a targeted goal of increasing the rate and
accuracy with which they read. In a review of several studies on the effectiveness of repeated
reading interventions, Therrien (2004) found it to be effective for students both with learning
disabilities (effect sizes range of .41 to .79) and without learning disabilities (range of .18 to .85),
with a mean effect size of .50 for generalization passages.
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The supported cloze procedure (SCP; Rasinski, 2003) is an assisted intervention in which
an instructor reads a passage jointly with a student. There are several variants of the SCP
intervention, but a typical approach involves the student and interventionist reading every other
word in a given passage, and then starting over while switching the words read such that each
word is both modeled for and read by the student. Thus, SCP interventions specifically target
reading accuracy by modeling correct reading of words in the passage. Interventions employing
SCP are also effective for improving skills such as fluency and comprehension (Homan, Klesius,
& Hite, 1993; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003).
Although SCP and repeated reading interventions are effective in terms of facilitating
reading fluency and comprehension (Homan et al., 1993; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Therrien, 2004),
the two types of interventions map onto the instructional hierarchy at different levels. Accuracy-
focused interventions (i.e., SCP) target the acquisition stage of the instructional hierarchy,
whereas interventions that focus on the speed of accurate responding (i.e., repeated reading)
target the proficiency stage. According to the instructional hierarchy, speed-focused
interventions might not be as effective when a student is still in the accuracy stage of a learning
task, because they have not yet acquired the skills to accurately read words. Thus, it might be
possible to target reading interventions more appropriately by considering the accuracy with
which students read, which is consistent with a need to target empirically-tested interventions in
a way that functionally matches the skill problem (Daly et al., 1996). Previous research for math
found that accuracy-focused interventions were more effective for students whose skills fell
within the acquisition phase than those whose skills fell within the proficiency phase (Burns,
Codding, Boice, & Lukito, 2010), but this assumption has not been tested for reading.
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The purpose of the current study was to extend instructional hierarchy research, and to
examine the relationship between an evidence-based intervention and a specific reading problem.
Thus, we examined whether reading fluency interventions would be more effective if they were
implemented after successfully building reading accuracy to an instructional level. The following
research question guided the study: What is the effect of a speed-based intervention on reading
fluency after reaching an instructional level via a high modeling intervention?
Method
Participants and Setting
Three third-grade students with reading difficulties were the participants for the study.
The first student was a White female named Julie (pseudonym), the second was a White male
named Ryan (pseudonym) and the third was a White male named Eric (pseudonym). All three
students attended the same elementary school in Minnesota and were participants in the school’s
AmeriCorps reading program. Students who are eligible for the AmeriCorps reading program
must (a) score below the 25th
percentile on the Measures of Academic Progress (Northwest
Evaluation Association, 2003), and (b) score below grade level expectations on the fall
benchmark assessment for oral reading fluency (i.e., a median score of 76 words read correctly
per minute or less on CBM-R benchmark assessment). The three current participants were
selected because they were also reading below the instructional level of 93% accuracy and had
been chosen to receive repeated reading as an intervention.
The school that the students attended served 850 students in grades 2 through 5 and was
located in a rural community. Demographic data for the students who attended the school
included 91% who were Caucasian and 28% who were eligible for the federal free or reduced
price lunch program.
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All interventions and assessments were conducted by a trained literacy tutor as part of the
Minnesota Reading Corps AmeriCorps program. The tutor was a Caucasian female who
participated in 2 days of training regarding the interventions and CBM-R before beginning the
interventions. The students participated in the intervention once every school day for 20 minutes
each session. The intervention sessions were delivered one-on-one in individual cubicles with the
student and tutor seated across from each other at a small table.
Materials
The intervention materials consisted of third-grade passages from the Dynamic Indicators
of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002) assessment system. Each
participant received intervention using the first passage in the DIBELS sequence on the first
intervention day. On subsequent days, participants received intervention with the next passages
in the sequence. If students received intervention long enough for each passage to be used, one
passage was randomly selected for each subsequent intervention session to be used a second
time. These passages were not returned to the pool to be selected again. Thus, each passage
may have been used up to two times.
Measures
The effectiveness of the interventions was measured once each week with CBM-R. Each
week, a new grade-level passage was selected randomly from the Aimsweb (Edformation, 2002)
assessment system and was presented to the student. Aimsweb passages were untreated passages
that were used a single time. Following standard administration procedures, the student was
asked to orally read each passage for 1 minute while the tutor followed along and recorded
errors. The number of words read correctly within that minute (WRCM) was recorded as the data
to address the research questions. Additionally, the number of words read correctly was divided
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by the total number of words (read correctly plus errors) and multiplied by 100 to create an
accuracy score of percentage of words read correctly.
Previous research has consistently demonstrated high reliability for monitoring student
progress with CBM-R (Marston, 1989; Wayman, Wallace, Wiley, Ticha, & Espin, 2007), and
that slopes derived with CBM-R data can be acceptably reliable for instructional decision
making after 6 to 8 weeks if administration procedures are optimal (Christ, 2006). Moreover,
accuracy data derived with CBM-R procedures have been shown to be sufficiently reliable for
instructional decision making (Burns, Tucker, Frame, Foley, & Hauser, 2000).
Conditions
The students participated in two interventions, both of which were conducted for 20 min
at least 3 days per week. All three started with RR for a period of 5 to 18 weeks. Julie and Eric
started receiving the interventions during the first weeks of the school year, but Ryan began later
in the year because he moved into the school district after the school year had started. The RR
procedure involved having the student orally read grade-level passages for 1 minute while the
tutor followed along, marked errors, and provided error correction after the student completed
the reading sample. This process was repeated four additional times (total of five), and each time
the tutor marked how far the student read during the minute so that the student would attempt to
read further during the next read.
The phase change between interventions was staggered and occurred after 5 weeks
beginning in week 9. At that time, all three students received the SCP in which the student read a
grade-level passage orally while the tutor followed along and provided immediate correction for
any errors. After reading the passage, the student and tutor read the passage two more times by
reading every other word. The student read the first word during the first read through (tutor-
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second word, student-third word, tutor-fourth word, etc.), and the tutor read the first word during
the third reading (student-second word, tutor-third word, student-fourth word, etc.).
Procedure
As stated above, two of the students began the intervention early within the school year
and the third started later because he moved into the district at that time. All three students
received RR as the first intervention. Julie received RR for 9 weeks, and then changed to SCP;
Ryan started the intervention when Julie changed phases, and received RR for 5 weeks. Eric
continued in RR for an additional 5 weeks after both Julie and Ryan changed to SCP, then he
changed phases as well. All three students continued to receive SCP until they accurately read at
least 93% of the words for five consecutive data points. At that time all three changed back to
RR. Julie required 10 weeks to reach that criterion, Ryan 9 weeks, and Eric 5 weeks. The
criterion of 93% was selected based on the lowest end of the instructional level of 93% to 97%
(Armstrong & Gickling, 1978; Gravois & Gickling, 2008). Five consecutive data points was
selected to assure that enough data were collected within the phase. All three students then
received RR until the school year ended in May.
Treatment Integrity and Interobserver Agreement
The tutor was observed twice each month by the first author with an implementation
checklist. Thus, a total of 10% of the intervention sessions were observed. The building principal
also observed the tutor twice each month to provide feedback on implementation integrity, but
those data were not collected as part of this study. The integrity checklists contained between 16
(SCP) and 20 (RR) items that asked whether standardized procedural steps for each intervention
were completed accurately. The total number of items correctly completed was divided by the
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total number of items and resulted in mean integrity of 98.21% (range 93.75% to 100%) for SCP
and 99.2% (range 95% to 100%) for RR.
Interobserver agreement (IOA) was also assessed for 10% of the sessions by observing
the assessment procedures and recording words as read correctly or incorrectly. The total number
of agreements (consistently rated as correct or incorrect) was divided by the total number of
words and multiplied by 100, which resulted in 100% IOA.
Experimental Design
The research question was addressed with a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design using
the CBM-R data as the dependent variable. The design was considered nonconcurrent because of
the different start dates for the three participants, but all of the data were collected in a
concurrent manner in that all three students participated simultaneously.
Results
As shown in Figure 1, the trend of the CBM-R data did not indicate an effective
intervention in the first RR phase. The numeric slope of the CBM-R data was computed with
ordinary least squares, which are reported for each participant in Table 1. The slopes for the first
phase of RR were all less than 1.0 WRCM increase per week and one was negative. The trend of
the accuracy data was also flat for two students, but increased somewhat for Ryan. The change to
SCP resulted in a slight increase in level of the accuracy data for the students, but the trend was
mostly stable with an increase for Ryan. The CBM-R data were mostly stable within the SCP
and consistent with the first RR phase, with a slight increase for one student (Ryan).
After consistently reading at least 93% of the words correctly within the SCP phase (i.e.,
five consecutive accuracy scores above 93%), the students again received RR. The percent of the
words read correctly continued to be high for the students, with mean scores at or above 93%
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(92.98 for Ryan). A visual analysis of the CBM-R data for the second RR phase as compared to
the SCP phase revealed a relatively rapid change in level and an increase in trend. The slopes for
the second RR phase for all three students were higher than the first RR phase and two were
above 4.00 words correct per minute increase per week.
Discussion
The current study examined the use of the instructional level as a criterion to target
acquisition and proficiency interventions for struggling readers. Results indicated that reading
fluency improved faster after accuracy levels were facilitated to within the instructional level.
This provides evidence supporting the application of the instructional hierarchy (Haring &
Eaton, 1978) to targeting reading interventions that are either accuracy- or speed-focused. The
first RR condition for each student resulted in low to negative growth in reading fluency, but the
mean accuracy was below the instructional level criteria of 93% for each student, which
suggested that the reading material was too challenging. After the SCP phase, in which high-
modeling facilitated accuracy levels to consistently within the instructional level range, the
second RR phase resulted in much stronger growth slopes. Thus the hierarchy of skill
development (Haring & Eaton), in which accuracy precedes proficiency, was supported by the
current findings. Once students could read grade-level passages with sufficient accuracy, they
made strong gains in a high-practice (i.e., RR) intervention; however, high practice without
accuracy led to minimal improvements.
Although the change in level during the final phase was not immediate for two of the
students, it was for Julie and the data in the final phase did not overlap with the data in the SCP
phase by the 2nd
data point for Ryan and 4th
for Eric. Some latency could be expected given that
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meta-analytic research found a large mean effect for academic interventions that lasted 11 to 30
intervention sessions (Swanson, 1999).
These data also support the instructional level theory initially proposed by Betts (1946)
and operationally defined by Gickling and Armstrong (1978). Student skill increased at a faster
rate once they participated in an intervention that increased accuracy to at least 93% known
words. Although previous instructional level research also focused on time on task (Burns &
Dean, 2005; Treptow et al., 2007) and reading comprehension (Gickling & Armstrong, 1978;
Treptow et al., 2007), neither of which were examined in the current study, the current data were
consistent with studies that found increased reading fluency when students were taught at an
instructional level (Burns, 2002; 2007). However, the accuracy data were not the primary
dependent variable and were included in Figure 1 simply to graphically display the criterion for a
phase change. Thus, we make no experimental claims regarding the effectiveness of SCP in
increasing the accuracy with which passages are read.
The current results suggest that educators who seek to develop interventions that lead to
faster reading growth rates might be able to use the instructional level criterion of 93% to
identify interventions that either (a) target interventions at accuracy development if student
reading skills are below 93% accurate; or (b) target interventions at speed development if student
reading skills are above 93% accurate. This is consistent with previous research that found
reading accuracy data can be appropriate for instructional decision making (Burns, 2007; Burns
et al., 2000). However, previous research also found that preteaching activities can facilitate an
instructional level and result in positive outcomes (Beck, Burns, & Lau, 2010; Burns, 2007). The
SCP was not used as a preteaching activity in this study, and future researchers could examine if
multiple interventions for facilitating an instructional level also result in similar rates of learning
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when interventions change focus to proficiency. Moreover, instructional level researchers
caution against having students read material that represents a frustration level task (Gravois &
Gickling, 2008). Using the SCP might reduce potential frustration, but additional research is
needed to determine if more long-term reading growth occurs from high modeling and support
within grade-level material that represents a frustration level without assistance, or from repeated
reading with material that represents an instructional level.
The results of the current study suggest several directions for future research. First, the
current accuracy intervention (i.e., SCP) is one of several accuracy-focused (i.e., high modeling)
interventions. An entire class of assisted reading strategies focuses on modeling fluent reading
rather than giving repeated practice (Dowhower, 1989). For instance, the neurological impress
method (Heckelman, 1969) has led to successful high-modeling interventions in which the
student follows along as a tutor reads an entire passage (Hollingsworth, 1970; Mefferd &
Pettegrew, 1997). Future research might examine and compare results found for other types of
accuracy interventions that could facilitate an instructional level.
A second direction of future research might investigate the criteria for which accuracy is
deemed sufficiently high that fluency interventions can be implemented. The criterion of five
passages at an instructional level before switching to RR was chosen relatively arbitrarily. It
seems logical that tutors or teachers should have high confidence that the passages students are
reading fall consistently within the instructional level, but it may be that fewer points are
sufficient or that more points are necessary. Similarly, additional criteria for sufficient accuracy
could be investigated and compared. Although the empirically-validated instructional level
(Gickling & Armstrong, 1978; Treptow et al., 2007) appears appropriate because of the
associated positive fluency outcomes, other criteria for accuracy might be found. For instance,
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less conservative criteria (i.e., accuracy ≥ 90%) might indicate a student is ready for a speed-
targeted intervention sooner. Future research should investigate the number of passages at the
instructional level as well as the accuracy criteria to ensure that interventionists make effective,
efficient decisions.
Interpretations of the current results should not be made without consideration of the
relevant limitations. Although the slope data in the final condition are consistently much higher
for each participant, suggesting the appropriateness of following an effectively targeted high-
modeling procedure with a high-practice procedure (which is consistent with the instructional
hierarchy; Haring & Eaton, 1978), each participant appeared to make consistently positive gains,
both in terms of level and slope across conditions. In other words, each participant had higher
levels and slopes in each successive condition. Thus, there remains a possibility of maturation
effects (Cook & Campbell, 1979) instead of the effects from the conditions in any given phase
and that these data simply suggest that reading fluency interventions increase reading fluency.
However, the consistent findings across participants are encouraging and should be replicated to
include design features that control for maturation effects on reading development. One
possibility is to apply a group design that compares whether maturation alone (i.e., repeated
reading intervention for duration of the study) or the SCP intervention alone (i.e., adding the SCP
intervention without a return to repeated reading) would result in similar rates of growth at the
same time points in which the high growth rates were observed in the current study.
Another limitation is that the mean accuracy for two of the participants was not markedly
below the instructional level in the first intervention phase. Julie and Eric both had relatively
high accuracy levels during the initial phase (i.e., mean accuracy of 92.72% and 92.21%,
respectively), thus subsequent intervention effects might have been attributable to generally
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higher reading accuracy skills. The accuracy for each student was not high enough to reach the
low end of the empirically tested instructional level for reading of 93% (Gickling & Armstrong,
1985; Treptow et al., 2007), but additional participants with clearly low accuracy (i.e., Ryan)
would provide more convincing replication of the current findings.
Additional limitations are related to the first phase of the study, which did not include
baseline conditions and did not achieve consistent control in the length of the first intervention
phase. A true baseline condition for a similar length of time as the intervention duration would
permit comparisons between growth without intervention and growth in the context of each
intervention phase. Moreover, Ryan started intervention when Julia changed to SCP, which was
9 weeks after Julia had begun. Eric started at week 3, after Julia had two CBM-R data points.
Traditional multiple baseline designs have the same start points for each participant making it
easier to discern trends in growth or level during the first phase. While Eric appeared to have a
sufficient number of data points to identify trends in growth or level, Ryan is missing a
considerable number of data points. Thus, less confidence can be attributed to Ryan’s data in the
first intervention phase, although they appear mostly stable.
Although the criterion for switching to RR at 93% accuracy over five consecutive
sessions was purposefully consistent with the low end of the instructional level criteria (Gickling
& Armstrong, 1978; Treptow et al., 2007), the current study was not designed to identify
differential effects of students reading at the independent level (i.e., ≥ 97% accuracy). This was
only consistently observed for one student (Ryan), who had three of five data points in the
independent range, but the effects of achieving an independent level of accuracy in the high-
modeling (i.e., SCP) phase remain unknown. It is plausible that accuracy performance at the
independent level might affect outcomes of interventions targeted to fluency.
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The implications of the study are also limited by the small and relatively homogeneous
sample. Each student was a third grader from a single elementary school who struggled at
reading connected text. Thus, extensions of the study might target a more diverse range of
students. Moreover, the general idea of targeting interventions at building accuracy before
speed, as per the instructional hierarchy (Haring & Eaton, 1978), was only examined on a narrow
range of reading skills. The current participants all struggled with reading connected text;
however, the development of other reading skills might also be facilitated by following the
instructional hierarchy. For example, the development of phonetic skills might follow a similar
course, in which case interventions for accuracy might facilitate later effectiveness of fluency
interventions. Moreover, we did not collect true baseline data in that the students received an
intervention within each phase.
Inclusive of the limitations, this study adds support for the instructional hierarchy as an
intervention heuristic because students made much stronger gains in response to a fluency-
focused intervention after obtaining a high level of accuracy. Future research is recommended to
both strengthen the current conclusions and expand the student population and reading skills for
which the current methods may be applicable.
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Table 1
Mean Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) Score, Mean Accuracy Score, and Slope for Each Phase
First Repeated Supported Cloze Second Repeated
Reading Phase Procedure Phase Reading Phase
Mean
ORF
Mean
Accuracy
Slope
Mean
ORF
Mean
Accuracy
Slope
Mean
ORF
Mean
Accuracy
Slope
(SD) (SD) (95% Confidence
Interval)
(SD) (SD) (95% Confidence
Interval)
(SD) (SD) (95% Confidence
Interval)
Julie 72.22 92.72% -2.15
(-4.62 to .32)
81.1 95.05% 0.27
(-2.20 to 2.75)
99.54 98.12% 1.73
(1.10 to 2.37)
(9.59) (2.13%) (9.22) (3.25%) (1.73) (1.15%)
Ryan 29.00 78.88% 0.80
(-3.53 to 5.13)
42.89 92.98% 0.42
(-2.26 to 3.09)
72.00 95.02% 4.13
(1.19 to 7.08)
(3.94) (6.93%) (8.28) (3.88%) (14.48) (1.77%)
Eric 83.66 92.21% 0.68
-.40 to 1.76
94.6 97.92% 0.70
(-7.27 to 8.67)
104.71 98.84% 5.79
(2.95 to 8.62)
(11.45) (2.71%) (6.95) (1.72%) (13.59) (1.42)
Note. ORF = Oral reading fluency score from the curriculum-based measurement for reading.
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Figure Caption
Figure 1. Accuracy and fluency data across repeated reading and supported cloze procedure
phases for each participant