BEA of Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Summer months can be a time of skill loss for students who are already struggling academically, especially when compared to their peers. Researchers studying this phenomenon have called for an expansion of high-quality summer programming. Despite many potentially effective programs, school professionals need more information about how to modify or augment these programs for students who still fail to make progress using a standard treatment approach. In addition, less is known about the best ways to identify effective interventions for students, especially in secondary school where comprehension is the instructional focus. Reciprocal teaching is one approach to teach reading comprehension strategies that has been frequently studied with secondary school students. Through reciprocal teaching, an instructor and a student take turns leading a dialogue about a text and applying four comprehension strategies, including predicting what might appear in the text, attempting to clarify word meanings or confusing text, summarizing the text, and generating questions. This project examined how BEA procedures can be used to identify potentially effective comprehension interventions for two elementary school students referred by because they demonstrated comprehension difficulties during the school year. In addition, an extended analysis was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the indicated intervention over time when used within the context of a comprehensive reading intervention.