Reading Tutors’ Interpretation of Curriculum-Based Measurement Graphs

This study examined reading tutors’ interpretation of reading progress-monitoring graphs. A think-aloud procedure was used to evaluate tutors at two points in time, before and after a year of service as an AmeriCorps reading tutor. During their service, the reading tutors received extensive training and ongoing coaching. Descriptive results showed a positive change from the Time 1–think-aloud (pretest) to the Time 2–think aloud (posttest). There were statistically significant changes from Time 1 to Time 2 for the majority of graph interpretation variables measured. Data suggest that the right type of support and training may serve to enable reading tutors to develop the skills to contribute to data-based decision-making within multitiered systems.

Generating Reliable Feedback About Students’ Performances Within an Automated Reading Tutor

Personalized learning technologies such as automated reading tutors have been proposed as a way to help struggling readers acquire needed skills while simultaneously encouraging engaged, sustained reading of entire books. This article investigates a key step in the development of such technologies: translating an entire novel into a sequence of nonoverlapping reading passages, so that valid feedback about students’ performances can be generated at the end of each tutoring session. A critical reliability issue that may be introduced at this step is identified, an approach for addressing that issue is proposed, and an evaluation conducted with respect to three popular middle-grade novels is presented. The findings suggest that our new approach provides more reliable evidence about students’ abilities and thus may be more appropriate for use when building automated reading tutors.

Long-term Effects of Male Reading Tutors, Choice of Text and Computer-based Text on Boys’ Reading Achievement

Sixty-two inner-city Canadian boys identified as struggling readers participated in a 22-week intervention that examined the effects of male reading tutors, computer-based texts, and choice of reading materials. Immediately after the intervention, boys demonstrated between-group changes to reader self-perceptions and gendered views of reading but no between-group differences in achievement. Two years after the intervention’s completion, the boys’ reading comprehension achievement scores were again examined and compared to 62 non-participating boys matched at the time of the study’s onset. Results showed no significant differences between the two groups. Of the boys who participated in the intervention, working with male reading tutors and with computer-based texts did not result in higher achievement than working with female reading tutors or with print-based texts. However, boys who were not given a choice in their reading materials demonstrated reading achievement six months ahead of the boys who were given a choice.