Balanced, Strategic Reading Instruction for Upper-Elementary and Middle School Students with Reading Disabilities

This intervention provides supplemental, intensive one-to-one reading tutoring for upper-elementary and middle school students with reading disabilities. The program combines phonemic awareness/analysis training using multisensory methods, strategic decoding instruction with five specific strategies, reading fluency practice through passage rereading, and reading comprehension strategy instruction. Students receive 20 hours of tutoring (one hour per day, four days per week, for five weeks) during summer break. The intervention uses high-interest/low-readability expository texts at students' instructional reading levels and includes daily curriculum-based measurement probes to monitor fluency progress. Two variations were tested that differed in the explicitness of comprehension strategy instruction.