Fluency and Comprehension

Fluency and Comprehension...

Have you ever read with a student and wondered how in the world they were able to comprehend what was read? Do you know students that read well, but can't remember one thing about the text? Yeah, me too! 

I  am certified in elementary education and special education P-12. I work in an elementary school where I have served as the RTI coordinator and interventionist for two years. I work with students in small groups for reading and math interventions and work collaboratively with teachers to meet the needs of students in the classroom. I am also responsible for organizing and collecting progress monitoring data on students in RTI, managing intervention programs, and maintaining the school's RTI program. Prior to this role, I was a collaborative special education teacher for multiple grade levels. 
In my role as a special educator and interventionist, I have had the opportunity to work with many different types of readers. I often find myself baffled at the comprehension or lack there of when reading with individual students. I have had students that are simply word callers. These students could read every word put in front of them with appropriate speed and accuracy, however, they could not recall any information from the text. I have also worked with students, on the opposite end of the reading spectrum, who were unable to read fluently and frequently stopped to decode or sound out words. In my experience, some students showed signs of higher comprehension despite their difficulty with word recognition and fluency. In an effort to understand how to better serve struggling readers, I have decided to conduct an action research project on the relationship between fluency and comprehension. 

More specifically, my research question is how does fluency impact comprehension? 


Here is the timeline for my action research:

Week of:	Objective/ activity
January 21st	·      Send informed consent forms home with students ·      Create sets of comprehension questions aligned with weekly DIBELS progress monitoring probe ·      Document baseline data (collected week of Jan 7th), document MAP scores (collected week of Jan 7th) ·      Give reading survey ·      Collect progress monitoring data ·      SRA decoding lesson
January 28th	Week 1 of implementation ·      Collect progress monitoring data ·      Continue small group meetings and SRA lesson ·      Receive informed consent and select students for focus group
February 4th	Week 2 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students
February 11th	Week 3 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students
February 18th	Week 4 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students
February 25th	Week 5 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students
March 6th	Week 6 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students
March 11th	Week 7 of implementation ·      Reflect on student performance ·      Collect data ·      Continue implementation ·      Interview/ conference with 2 students ·      Analyze data
March 18th	·      Analyze data ·      Present Action Research findings to peers
March 25th	·      Reflect on the process of Action Research ·      Complete draft of research article ·      Present findings to colleagues