Additional Studies

Treatment Group/Control Group

Special education students, grades 3 through 8, Huron County, MI

Johnson, G. and Weaver, J.

Students’ assessments in Huron County, MI, showed a substantial discrepancy in oral reading fluency between general education students and special education students. To narrow this gap, the Huron Intermediate School District implemented the Read Naturally program and targeted special education students.

School psychologists Gloria Johnson and Jim Weaver collected and analyzed data to compare the test results of special education students who received Read Naturally instruction with the test results of special education students without Read Naturally instruction and with general education students.

As indicated by the slope of the Read Naturally graph lines (in blue) in the graph below and the data in the table that follows, the special education students who received Read Naturally instruction had greater gains in fluency than the special education students without Read Naturally instruction.

Comparison of Grade-Level Reading Performance

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The school district used reading mazes to evaluate comprehension. In the timed reading maze task, the student was given a grade-level paragraph in which every seventh word was deleted. The student was presented with three choices and  asked to select the best word to fill in the blank, based on the context of the story. The results from the reading mazes indicated that special education students receiving Read Naturally instruction had greater gains in comprehension than the general education students (see table below).