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Lauren LaMantia

Mrs. Wargo

EDU 385

February 26, 2020

Matching Interventions to Reading Needs: A Case for Differentiation

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Matching Interventions to Reading Needs: A Case for Differentiation is an

outcry to stop using “quick-fix” strategies on struggling readers. Approximately

“one third of fourth-grades are reading below the fourth-grade benchmark,”

(Jones, Conradi, & Amendum, 2016, Pg. 307) and “more than 6,000 third-

grade students failed a high-stakes state reading comprehension test.” (Jones,

Conradi, & Amendum, 2016, Pg. 307) These statistics proclaim the need for

effective, research-based intervention methods. The article declares their desire

for a differentiated approach to intervention strategies that are brief and

systematic by targeting the students’ most pressing need.

This article outlined the immense deficit of struggling readers in the

areas of word recognition, reading rate, and comprehension. According to the

research presented within the article, 8.1% of students struggle with word

recognition. This group of students is lacking the most fundamental part of

reading – decoding. The article recommends the intervention strategies of

DISSECT and word families for promoting decoding skills. By practicing these

explicit strategies, the students will be better equipped for future encounters

with these components of decoding. Next, the article declared that 28.5% of

students were able to decode fairly proficiently but without automaticity. The

authors addressed the ultimate goal of reading is making meaning. With this

goal in mind, it is essential to remember that the rate of reading should be

improved gradually to ensure that the student can devote attention to thinking

while reading. The article suggests repeated readings, readers theatre, echo

reading, and choral reading to improve the students’ reading rates. These
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strategies promote fluency and automaticity through the modeling of

appropriate reading by the teacher and fellow peers. Lastly, the article

highlighted that 63.3% of students had great difficulty with comprehension

despite appearing proficient in other areas. These students struggle to make

sense of what they read due to their teachers overemphasis on speed of reading

rather than comprehension. The article declared that comprehension

interventions should be focused on cultivating text-based thinking to equip the

students with adequate skills for deriving meaning and purpose from their

readings. The article suggests utilizing graphic organizers to improve

comprehension while reading. Overall, the article called for a reform in

intervention strategies for struggling readers because the current practices are

not meeting their specific needs.

Based on my sessions with numerous different students, I have realized

the importance of reading. Reading is the foundation for all educational

subjects. If a student struggles to read, they will most likely struggle in their

other course work because they are unable to comprehend what they are being

told or asked to do. During my tutoring sessions with Kamara, I have come to

realize the benefit of graphic organizers for her. She struggles with

comprehension because she lacks fluency in her reading and reads one word at

a time. By reading in this manor, she is neglecting to understand the purpose

or meaning of the passage. When I provide her with a graphic organizer, she

can remember one or two key items to jot down on her organizer after she has

completed the passage. Additionally, this strategy enables her to go back into
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the passage and derive more specific information to construct meaning. The

article declared that students need to “think across text or connect something

in the text with expected background knowledge” (Jones, Conradi, &

Amendum, 2016, Pg. 313) to construct meaning from a passage. The utilization

of a graphic organizer allows Kamara to think across the text in a systematic

method that does not subtract from her practice of fluency while reading

because she is able to reread sections several to extract necessary details while

simultaneously improving her fluency. This article made a distinct connection

between the intervention strategies impact on the struggling reader and the

specific need(s) of the struggling reader by identifying the deficits in both areas

and suggesting explicit methods which are aligned with evidence-based

rationales.
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References

Jones, J. S., Conradi, K., and Amendum, S. (2016) Matching

Interventions to Reading Needs: A Case for Differentiation. The Reading

Teacher, 70, pp. 307-316.