Date of Award:

5-2012

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Committee Chair(s)

D. Ray Reutzel

Committee

D. Ray Reutzel

Committee

Jamison Fargo

Committee

Sylvia Read

Committee

Cindy Jones

Committee

Sarah Clark

Abstract

An investigation was conducted to determine the best criterion for advancement to a new reading passage during the commonly used classroom strategy of repeated reading. Knowing when to move students to a new passage during the repeated reading process was considered of value to teachers in efficiently using student learning time. The study also explored the effect of demographic variables (age, ethnicity, gender, SES, and beginning reading ability) on predicting outcome measures based on repeated reading scores.

A complex multi-level structural equation model was developed to study (a) the growth of student's ability to read words with speed and accuracy and (b) how student demographic features affect growth rates. This multilevel structural equation model used included two phases: multilevel growth modeling and path analysis. It was found that using a hot (or final) read-advancement criterion provided a better model fit than the hypothesized advancement criterion of a student's increase or gain between cold (beginning) and hot (final) reads. Also, student growth during repeated reading was found to be constant once a minimum words-read-correctly-per-minute (WRCM) criterion of 25 was reached. Repeated reading was shown to be a strategy that worked equally well for all students with little variance explained by the slope of student growth. Furthermore, the strategy was shown to be effective for non-White learners and showed promise in helping to close the achievement gap.

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Comments

This work made publicly available electronically on April 12, 2012.

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