In her recent blog post All Improvement Is Not Equal!, Read Naturally founder Candyce Ihnot explores the relationship between the number of Read Naturally Live stories her students had read between Fall and Winter and their fluency improvement during that time period. Candyce discovered that the students who had read the most stories had made the greatest gains.

Dr. Danielle Dupuis of the University of Minnesota's Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement made the same discovery in her recent analysis of extant data from Read Naturally Live students.

Dupuis analyzed data from second-grade Read Naturally Live students and found that students who had read 24 or more Read Naturally stories from Fall to Spring had more growth (1.4 to 1.6 average words gained per week) than is expected from Grade 2 students (0.6 to 1.2 average words gained per week). Furthermore, the Read Naturally Live students who read 36 or more Read Naturally stories made more growth (1.63 average words per week) than the students who read between 24 and 35 stories (1.43 average words per week).

Thus, the data analyzed by Dupuis shows that a Read Naturally intervention resulted in statistically significant gains for all students who completed 24 or more stories between Fall and Spring, and that the students who read the greatest number of stories made the greatest progress. Click here to see Dupuis' full analysis.

As Candyce Ihnot analyzed her students’ Fall-to-Winter data, she knew that if she could motivate the students to complete a greater number of stories during the remainder of the school year, they would improve more rapidly. “So then the question became: How could I get them to work harder and read more?” Candyce asked. You’ll have to read her blog post to find out the clever way she answered this question.