Impact of a Self-Determination Intervention on the Reading Fluency of Struggling Elementary Students

Struggling readers are likely to face life-long challenges in achieving success in school and life as a result of their struggles with reading (Armbruster et al., 2001; Arnold, 2010; Hernandez, 2011). Third-grade students with reading disabilities are an exceptionally critical group who may experience enhanced risk during the year that the focus of schooling switches from learning to read to reading to learn (Lesnick et al., 2010). Students with learning disabilities need a robust rate of improvement to close the gap with their peers and access grade-level content. Oral reading fluency (ORF), assessed using reading-curriculum-based measures (R-CBM), provides a standardized measure of a student's overall progress in reading, including the rate of improvement (Roehrig et al., 2008). By the end of first grade, poor readers will likely experience significant and declining levels of motivation and engagement (Armbruster et al., 2001; Didion, 2019; Stanovich, 1986; Toste et al., 2020). Confidence in reading, or a student's view of themselves as readers, is integral to reading achievement and thus has been added as a vital component of the Nation's Report Card on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment (NAEP, 2019). Together, these research findings and public policy changes provide evidence that reading skills and self-determination skills such as motivation, engagement, and confidence are intertwined and affect one another. Thus, struggling students may need interventions addressing reading and self-determination skill sets to facilitate achievement (Wehmeyer et al., 2017). This single case experimental design study provided a self-determination intervention to three third-grade students with learning disabilities who were already receiving a research-based reading intervention. Intervention procedures were based on the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI) with the training component from Data Mountain. Both programs SUMMARY (Continued) are research-based and teach students to become self-regulated learners through a continual process of goal setting, action planning, progress monitoring, and reflection (Didion, 2019; Shogren et al., 2017). The central research question of this study was whether elementary students with reading disabilities would demonstrate increased oral reading fluency performance (level and trend) when participating in a self-determination intervention. Specifically, the study tested the effects of using the SDLMI and Data Mountain procedures on the ORF growth of third-grade students already receiving an evidence-based reading intervention. Visual inspection and the effect size metric found mixed results on the effectiveness of the intervention. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.