Effective Intervention for Adolescents With Reading Disabilities: Combining Reading and Motivational Remediation to Improve Outcomes

Adolescents with reading disability (RD) participated in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a multiple-component reading intervention with motivational components (PHAST). A total of 514 youth in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade formed instructional groups (4-8) that were randomly assigned to one of three conditions-one of two PHAST interventions (additional comprehension or fluency training) or a remedial reading control condition. Intervention occurred in participants' schools, 40-60 min daily, 3-5x/week, for 100-125 hr total. Over four outcome assessments. multilevel growth models evaluated intervention/control differences in growth over time, and post-intervention effect sizes. The two PHAST interventions were associated with equivalent positive outcomes, and their data combined. PHAST participants out-performed Control participants on 8 of 16 outcomes, demonstrating greater growth on standardized and experimental reading and spelling outcomes. PHAST-instructed students demonstrated higher sense of reading competence, and increased attributions of reading success to their own abilities. Intervention effect sizes (Hedge's g) comparing PHAST versus Control growth were larger for foundational reading skills (.78 for nonword decoding, .56 for word identification) than for reading comprehension (.36 for passage comprehension), for which effects were more equivocal. An effect size of .61 was obtained for sense of reading competence. A year later, the PHAST participants demonstrated continued improvement on later-developing reading skills like word reading efficiency, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Intensive reading intervention in middle school can produce gains on multiple dimensions of reading skill and motivation and foster continuing growth of higher-order reading skills.