A Synthesis of Reading Interventions and Effects on Reading Comprehension Outcomes for Older Struggling Readers

By M. Edmonds, S. Vaughn, J. Wexler, C. Reutebuch, A. Cable, K. Tackett, Jennifer Wick Schnakenberg. Review of Educational Research, 2009

596 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reports a synthesis of intervention studies conducted between 1994 and 2004 with older students (Grades 6–12) with reading difficulties. Interventions addressing decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension were included if they measured the effects on reading comprehension. Twenty-nine studies were located and synthesized. Thirteen studies met criteria for a meta-analysis, yielding an effect size (ES) of 0.89 for the weighted average of the difference in comprehension outcomes between treatment and comparison students. Word-level interventions were associated with ES = 0.34 in comprehension outcomes between treatment and comparison students. Implications for comprehension instruction for older struggling readers are described.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8174633eb9e21d41944513626d5f1e86ab3e3572

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

Examining the Simple View of Reading in a Transparent Orthography: A Longitudinal Study From Kindergarten to Grade 3 (2016, background): “Third, intervention studies have shown that gains in decoding skills do not always translate into gains in reading comprehension (e.g., Edmonds et al., 2009).”
Building a House on Sand: Why Disciplinary Literacy Is Not Sufficient to Replace General Strategies for Adolescent Learners Who Struggle (2012, methodology): “Specifically, two recent meta-analyses were chosen for both reading strategy instruction (i.e., Edmonds et al., 2009; Wanzek, Wexler, Vaughn, & Ciullo, 2010) and writing strategy instruction (i.e., Graham & Perin, 2007; Rogers & Graham, 2008).”
Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers to Improve Reading Skills (2017, background): “, 2008), however, the impacts of existing multicomponent interventions have often been modest, especially when moved to scale in lowperforming schools and with teacher, rather than researcher, implementation (Edmonds et al., 2009; Scammacca et al., 2007; Solis, Miciak, Vaughn, & Fletcher, 2014; Wanz”
Extensive Reading Interventions for Students With Reading Difficulties After Grade 3 (2013, methodology): “Both Edmonds et al. (2009) and Scammacca et al. (2007) noted smaller mean effects when considering only norm-referenced outcome measures.”
Academic Interventions for Elementary and Middle School Students With Low Socioeconomic Status: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2017, background): “K to 12 with learning disabilities; and Edmonds et al. (2009); Flynn, Zheng, and Swanson (2012); Wanzek et al. (2013); and Scammaca, Roberts, Vaughn, and Stuebing (2015) reviewed programs for struggling readers in Grades 6 to 12, 5 to 9, above fourth grade, and Grades 4 to 12, respectively.”
How Methodological Features Affect Effect Sizes in Education (2016, methodology): “Second, researcher-developed measures are more likely to be used in small-scale studies, while standardized tests, which may be less sensitive to treatments, are often used in large-scale studies (de Boer et al., 2014; Edmonds et al., 2009; Li & Ma, 2010; Scammacca et al., 2007).”
Efficacy of Collaborative Strategic Reading With Middle School Students* (2011, background): “The goal of comprehending text is not easily attainable for many adolescents, who demonstrate consistent and persistent difficulties with reading for understanding (Edmonds et al., 2009; Williams, 1998, 2000).”
Instructing Struggling Older Readers: A Selective Meta–Analysis of Intervention Research (2012, background): “Taken together, the results suggested that ESs were low across a broad array of interventions and align with the ﬁndings of prior syntheses (e.g., Edmonds et al., 2009; Scammacca et al., 2007; Wanzek et al., 2010).”
Adolescent struggling readers in urban schools: Results of a Latent Class Analysis (2011, background): “…especially with those attending urban schools, and as a result, the achievement gap has not significantly narrowed, particularly for certain subgroups of learners (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010; Denton & Vaughn, 2008; Edmonds et al., 2009; Hess, 2008; Slavin et al., 2008).”
The Role of Oral Language Skills in Reading and Listening Comprehension of Text: A Comparison of Monolingual (L1) and Bilingual (L2) Speakers of English Language. (2014, background): “Finally, L2 learners are also likely to benefi t from systematic instruction in comprehension strategies, which is found to be one of the most effective ways of supporting text comprehension skills (Edmonds et al., 2009).”
A Review of Summarizing and Main Idea Interventions for Struggling Readers in Grades 3 Through 12: 1978–2016 (2019, background): “Despite this need, many teachers view themselves as content area teachers rather than reading teachers and assume that students with adequate word reading skills also have adequate reading comprehension (Edmonds et al., 2009).”
Methods for dealing with multiple outcomes in meta-analysis: a comparison between averaging effect sizes, robust variance estimation and multilevel meta-analysis (2017, background): “…from multiple testing occasions, multiple treatment groups, and multiple outcomes in their meta-analysis of 36 studies on Reading Recovery, while Edmonds et al. (2009) also reported 78 effect sizes calculated from multiple measures and multiple comparison groups in their meta-analysis of 21…”