The purpose of this study was to examine growth in reading comprehension and fluency of fourth-grade general education students receiving instruction in Reading Mastery, Signature Edition, or Scott Foresman’s Celebrate Reading program.
High-achieving students in a Midwestern elementary school were randomly assigned to one of the programs and received instruction for ninety minutes a day. Each group had two teachers (four teachers in all), who were randomly assigned to teach the different groups. The curriculum-based AIMSweb measurement system was used to gather fluency and comprehension data.
While there were no significant differences between the groups at baseline, the RM group had significantly stronger growth in both fluency and comprehension skills over the school year. Effect sizes associated with the differences at spring were .75 for fluency and .41 for comprehension, both higher than the level usually used to denote educational significance.
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