| The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of an instructional design implemented by computers on the development of reading fluency in second graders. The development of fluency is an essential stage in learning to read. National Association of Educational Progress found that 44% of 4th graders were not fluent on grade level material. This is a serious problem because failure to develop fluency can hamper reading comprehension and further development in reading. The study took place in an inner city public elementary school over a five month period with 65 second graders. The instructional design implemented by computers included three major components. First, the children were given electronic copies of leveled books on their instructional level for reading practice. The children could choose to have selected words or the entire text pronounced by the computer. Finally, the computer monitored their progress with a modified cloze activity. The computer-assisted reading practice was compared with traditional independent reading practice. The independent reading practice used print copies of similar leveled books but was not monitored. A counterbalanced design was used in which each student took part in both computer-assisted and independent reading practice. The overall results indicate that the students made significantly more progress during the computer-assisted intervention (p < 0.001). The effect size for four separate measures, a fluency measure, QRI Comprehension, MAT-8 and QRI Word Recognition, were 1.24, 0.44, 0.44, and 0.27 respectively. The 33 students that had the computer-assisted phase in the first ten weeks continued to make progress in the second ten week phase in three of the four measures. All ability groups made more progress in fluency during the computer-assisted intervention. The highest ability group made the least amount of overall progress and the lowest ability group made the most progress. This study indicates that an instructional design implemented by computers is effective in developing fluency. |
