Wright, J. & Cleary, K. (2006)

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http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/wright-j-cleary-k-2006 1/9

KIDS IN THE TUTOR SEAT: BUILDING SCHOOLS’ CAPACITY

TO HELP STRUGGLING READERS THROUGH A

CROSS-AGE PEER-TUTORING PROGRAM

JIM WRIGHT AND KRISTI S. CLEARY

Syracuse City School District

Increasingly, elementary schools across America are adopting prereferral intervention modelsthat follow a structured problem-solving consultation process to reduce referrals to special edu-cation and to improve student academic outcomes. One feasible and affordable systems-levelsolution for a school that must deliver reading interventions of high quality to many children isan effective cross-age peer-tutoring program. The present study examines the impact of a school-based peer-tutoring intervention on the fluency of delayed readers in an urban school district.A peer-tutoring program was implemented across four elementary schools, with a total of 27tutors and 27 tutees. Tutors and tutees were monitored weekly using CBM oral reading-fluencyprobes, and treatment integrity checks were conducted periodically on all tutor pairs. While bothtutors and tutees showed increases in reading fluency during the program, students receiving

tutoring made substantially greater gains than did tutors. The article provides guidelines forimplementing an effective cross-age peer-tutoring program in a range of school settings. © 2006Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Elementary-school children across the nation demonstrate reading deficits serious enough to

interfere with learning. A recent government study indicated that nearly 40% of fourth-grade

students fell below grade level on state reading tests in 2003 (U.S. Department of Education,

2003), a figure that has declined only slightly over the past decade.

Students with reading delays in the primary grades must first attain basic fluency in the

decoding of text before they can efficiently comprehend the meaning of reading passages. Indeed,

the National Reading Panel (2000) recognized that fluent reading is an essential foundation skill tohigher level comprehension. When decoding has become largely automatic, students are no longer

forced to unlock meaning at the word level but instead can devote crucial cognitive resources to

understanding larger ideas conveyed through text.

The instructional hierarchy (Haring, Lovitt, Eaton, & Hansen,1978) is one useful way to

conceptualize the instructional support that dysfluent readers need. The instructional hierarchy

describes the act of learning as a series of four stages. The learner initially goes through the

acquisition phase, the period during which he or she first manages to perform a skill accurately or

to commit knowledge to memory. The learner then advances to the fluency stage, where he or she

learns to perform the target skill more quickly or recall and apply the target knowledge with

greater speed. As the student becomes both fluent and accurate in performance, he or she is readyto apply the skill or knowledge in novel settings or situations (generalization phase) and eventu-

ally apply the skill or knowledge to new uses (adaptation phase).

As a framework for determining what instructional strategies will best help students, the

instructional hierarchy has direct application to reading (Daly, Lentz, & Boyer, 1996). Students

who can read text but are considerably slower decoders than their typical reading peers would fall

within the fluency phase of the instructional hierarchy. These students are likely to benefit from

interventions that boost fluency by providing increased opportunities to practice reading with

Jim Wright is now a school administrator with the Baldwinsville (NY) Central School District.We express our appreciation to the following graduate students who served as site coordinators for the study: Karrie

Clark, Kristin Sladewski, Patricia Hamlin, Amanda Miller, and Marilyn Korth.Correspondence to: Jim Wright, Department of Special Education, Baldwinsville Schools, 29 East Oneida Street,

Baldwinsville, NY 13027. E-mail: [email protected]

Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 43(1), 2006 © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/pits.20133

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corrective feedback as needed. And such interventions are becoming more widely known. For

example, in their meta-analysis of effective practices for reading instruction, the National Reading

Panel (2000) recommended specific “evidence-based” rehearsal strategies such as listening-while-

reading and paired reading. These simple fluency-building interventions can be taught quickly and

carried out using commonly available instructional materials.On the surface, then, it would seem to be an easy matter for schools to provide appropriate

remediation to the large numbers of students who each year come to their teachers’ attention as

slow readers: Match these dysfluent readers to one of a small number of evidence-based reading

interventions designed to increase their reading speed; however, school-based consultants know

that a host of issues can arise that reduce the effectiveness of classroom interventions or even

render them ineffective. Key potential “blockers” to effective classroom interventions include

limited staff time to conduct those interventions, lack of manuals or other standardized training

materials to ensure that the intervention is carried out with a high degree of integrity, and dis-

agreement between teaching staff and consultants about the theoretical framework that informs or

explains the student’s learning problem (Kratochwill & Shernoff, 2004). It is important that plan-ners recognize potential blockers to academic interventions and proactively find solutions to over-

come them. Otherwise, intervention ideas proven to be effective in highly controlled, well-funded

efficacy studies will not make their way from the research setting into the applied setting of the

classroom.

Development of a Cross-Age Peer-Tutoring Program

The remainder of this article describes and presents an evaluation of a cross-age peer-tutoring

program recently developed for use in an urban district located in the Northeastern United States.

Peer tutors were selected as a vehicle to deliver a reading-rehearsal intervention to dysfluent readers

because it was anticipated that school staff would lack sufficient time to take responsibility for suchan intervention. Highly effective programs such as Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (Fuchs, Fuchs,

Mathes, & Simmons, 1997) and Class-wide Peer Tutoring (Greenwood & Delquadri, 1995) already

exist that assign helping roles to students within a single classroom; however, we decided to create

an external, cross-age program (Ehly, 1986; Garcia-Vazquez & Ehly, 1995) that recruits older stu-

dents from other classrooms as reading tutors so the intervention would not be limited only to those

students whose instructors were willing to embrace a within-classroom tutoring program.

For the active treatment component of the program, we selected listening-while-reading, an

evidence-based strategy for building reading fluency (National Reading Panel, 2000; Rose &

Sherry, 1984; Van Bon, Boksebeld, Font Freide, & Van den Hurk, 1991). Listening-while-reading

is an approach that allows the less-skilled reader to “rehearse” a passage by first following alongsilently in the text while the more accomplished reader reads it aloud. Then the tutee reads the

same passage aloud, receiving help and corrective feedback on difficult words as needed.

In accordance with recommendations for promoting evidence-based interventions in school

settings (Kratochwill & Shernoff, 2004), we used a comprehensive manual to implement the

program. The manual provided guidelines for recruiting and training tutors, managing a cross-age

peer-tutoring program, and monitoring treatment integrity (Wright, 2004).

Purpose of the Present Study

The present study is intended to assess the impact of a peer-tutoring program on the reading flu-

ency of both tutors and tutees. This investigation can be thought of as an “effectiveness study” (Kra-

tochwill & Shernoff, 2004) that poses the following question: How successfully does a specific

evidence-based reading intervention—listening-while-reading—generalize to a school setting when

embedded within a cross-age peer-tutoring program withpackagedtrainingand management elements?

100 Wright and Cleary

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Method

Participants

Setting. Four elementary schools within a single urban district were selected for the study.

The host district has been formally designated by its state education department as having “highstudent needs relative to district resource capacity.” The student population was diverse, with a

mean percentage of minority students enrolled in these four schools at 66% (range 32–86%). An

average of 78% of students at the schools qualified for free and reduced lunch (range 64–94%).

The average building enrollment at the schools was 408 pupils (range 265–592).

Recruiting of site coordinators, tutors, and tutees. Graduate students completing a practi-

cum requirement in a local school psychology program were recruited to serve as site coordinators

of the tutoring program at each school. Site coordinators met with teachers to share student-

selection criteria. Teachers were asked to nominate students from their classrooms who would be

good candidates to serve as tutors or to be tutored. At minimum, prospective tutors were expected

to read at or above a mid-second-grade level, show generally appropriate behaviors when away

from direct adult supervision, be willing to assume a helping role with younger children, and

reliably be able to follow a simple set of strategies during tutoring. Teachers were asked to nom-

inate as tutees children who showed substantial delays in reading fluency in comparison to peers.

At a minimum, prospective tutees were expected to read at the instructional level in preprimer

(early first grade) text or higher, be willing to read aloud in the presence of the tutor, accept

corrective feedback and direction from the tutor, and show generally appropriate behaviors when

away from direct adult supervision.

Across the four schools, 13 tutors were selected from third grade and 14 from fourth grade.

Eighteen students selected as tutors were female, and 9 were male. Fourteen tutees from the

participating schools were selected from second grade and 13 from third grade. Seventeen tuteeswere male, and 10 were female (Collection and reporting of additional demographic information

about the participating students was not permitted by the host school district.) Tutors were matched

with tutees on the basis of compatible schedules, resulting in both same-gender and mixed-gender

pairings.

Materials

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) probes. These probes were prepared to assess base-

line reading fluency for both tutors and tutees and to track both groups’ growth in reading rate over

the course of the tutoring intervention. To create a library of CBM probes, samples of text were

randomly selected from books in the Silver, Burdett, & Ginn (Pearson et al., 1991) reading seriesand used to prepare reading probes according to procedures outlined by Shinn (1989). CBM

reading probes from each book in the reading series were collected, placed in random order, and

organized in binders for use in assessment by site coordinators.

Tutor-training and program-implementation materials. A peer-tutoring manual was pre-

pared with step-by-step instructions for program coordinators to follow in implementing peer

tutoring in their schools. Additionally, the manual included a four-session curriculum for training

student peer tutors (Wright, 2004).

Procedures

Training of site coordinators. Site coordinators were trained in a series of three 3-hr ses-

sions. The first session covered logistical issues connected with tutoring, including recruiting

students, matching tutors to students, and locating space in the building for peer-tutoring sessions

Cross-Age Peer Tutoring 101


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to take place. The second session presented the scripted modules used to train elementary-age

tutors. In the final session, site coordinators were trained in data-collection procedures (CBM and

treatment-integrity measures).

Training of peer tutors. Once peer tutors were recruited and parent permission was obtainedfor their participation, site coordinators provided tutors with a four-session, scripted training in

peer tutoring (Wright, 2004). Sessions were scheduled during the school day and lasted about

40 min each. In the first session, the tutors were taught the expected behaviors of a student tutor,

including guidelines for how to enter a classroom to pick up a child for tutoring, behavioral

expectations for independently moving through the halls to and from tutoring sessions, and tips for

managing any mild problem behaviors presented by the tutee. In the second session, tutors were

taught to give compliments, praise, and verbal and nonverbal encouragement to tutees. In the third

session, tutors learned to conduct the listening-while-reading activity to be used during their

tutoring sessions. In the final session, the adult trainer reviewed all of the skills previously taught

and provided a final opportunity for the students to practice those skills under adult supervision.

Determining initial reading rate of tutors and tutees. Prior to the start of the tutoring pro-

gram, each tutor and tutee was administered a survey-level assessment, using CBM oral reading-

fluency probes. Oral reading-fluency norms from Shapiro (1996) were consulted as guidelines to

determine each student’s instructional reading level (defined for purposes of the study as the

highest book in the reading series in which each student was able to read at an instructional rate of

fluency). Students who failed to attain instructional fluency in at least the lowest book (i.e., begin-

ning first grade: preprimer level) in the reading series were not included in the tutoring program,

as they were judged to lack sufficient reading skills to benefit from the fluency-building compo-

nent of the program.

The median instructional reading level for tutees selected for participation in the programwas mid-first-grade (preprimer). Only 1 of the 27 tutees (4%) was instructionally fluent in text at

his or her grade level. The median instructional reading level for tutors was early third grade.

Nineteen of the 27 tutors in the study (70%) were found to be instructionally fluent in grade-level

text or higher at the start of the study.

Progress-monitoring with CBM. Tutors and tutees were monitored throughout the study

using CBM reading probes at their instructional reading level. Both tutors and tutees were mon-

itored at least once per instructional week. Site coordinators collected baseline data to estimate

each student’s reading rate prior to the start of the peer-tutoring program, with a median of 3 CBM

baseline data points collected on each student (range 2–6). While the peer tutoring was in effect,

each tutor and tutee was assessed for reading fluency using CBM at least once per instructionalweek. Each time that a student was assessed, fresh CBM probes were selected at the student’s

instructional level from the library of CBM probes. An average (median) of 22 CBM data points

was collected on each student (range 11–31) during the peer-tutoring program.

Interrater agreement and treatment-integrity checks. Site coordinators audiotaped 25% of

the sessions in which they administered CBM reading probes to monitor student progress. An

independent rater (K.S.C.) then rescored these probes from the audiotapes. Interrater agreement

was computed by dividing the number of words from a passage on which both raters were in

agreement by the number of agreements plus disagreements. The mean rate of interrater agree-

ment was 98% (range 87–100%).

When the tutoring program began, tutors met with their tutees individually for two 20-min

sessions per week. Site coordinators conducted treatment-integrity checks on a biweekly basis to

verify that peer tutors were delivering the program with fidelity. A checklist-style protocol was



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created that listed 10 essential steps to be followed during each tutoring session (see Appendix A).

Site coordinators observed tutoring sessions and checked off those steps that they saw correctly

carried out during tutoring. Treatment integrity was computed in percentage form by first dividing

the number of tutoring steps observed being correctly carried out by the total number of possible

steps and then multiplying the resulting figure by 100. An average of nine treatment-integritychecks was conducted of each peer tutor during the study (range 4–13). The mean level of

treatment integrity observed during the tutoring program was 90% (range 70–100%).

Results

The average (median) number of instructional weeks during which each peer-tutoring pair

participated in the program was 19.2 (range 8.6–21.2). Prior to the start of tutoring, students

who were the recipients of tutoring read at a mean fluency rate of 52 words per minute (range

44–55, SD 3.87). Tutees’ mean rate of reading fluency grew to 70 words per minute during the

treatment (tutoring) phase (range 63–75, SD 3.62). Before tutoring began, student tutors read

an average of 73 words per minute at their instructional level (range 52–85, SD 10.66).

During tutoring, their mean fluency rate increased to 86 words per minute (range 62–101, SD

14.1).

Using the ordinary least-squares method (Moore & McCabe, 1989), slope of improvement

was calculated for both tutors and tutees for both baseline and tutoring phases of the study. Base-

line reading-fluency data collected on tutees prior to tutoring showed a median rate of growth in

reading fluency (slope) of 0.4 words per instructional week (range7.2–9.5). The median slope

in reading fluency for tutees during the program was 1.05 words per instructional week (range

1.26–4.1). Prior to onset of the tutoring program, tutors showed an average increase of 0.4

words per week (range 7.85–13.9). During the program, the tutor group increased their rate of

improvement in reading speed to 0.55 words per week (range 1.28–3.0).

Effect size (ES) also was computed employing a “standardized difference approach” (Faith,

Allison, & Gorman, 1996) suitable for use in single-subject research (Shernoff, Kratochwill, &

Stoiber, 2002). To calculate the ES for each student, the mean of the baseline phase was subtracted

from the mean of the treatment phase. The difference was then divided by the standard deviation

of data values in the baseline phase (Faith et al., 1996) (Data from 3 tutor and 2 tutee cases could

not be used to calculate ES because they had fewer than 3 data points in the baseline phase.) The

median ES for tutors during the peer tutoring study was 0.73 (range 4.65 to 5.9, SD 1.34)

while the median ES for tutees was 1.81 (range 2.3–6.3, SD 2.58).

Discussion

This study assessed the impact of a school-based cross-age peer-tutoring program in reading.

In particular, the study investigated the effect of a simple, evidence-based fluency-building read-

ing intervention—listening-while-reading—in increasing the reading fluency of children partici-

pating as tutors and as tutees.

Students being tutored in the study increased their reading fluency at an average rate of about

one additional word per instructional week. There are only limited data available to predict expected

rates of growth in reading fluency. One of the more widely used benchmarks for determining

typical rates of increase in reading speed (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett, Walz, & Germann,1993) sug-

gested that a “realistic” goal for fluency growth for second graders is 1.5 words per week while a

reasonable expectation for third graders is 1.0 words per week. Using these guidelines, children

being tutored in the study built their reading fluency at a rate that matched, or approached, that of

typical readers at their grade level.



7/17/2019 Wright, J. & Cleary, K. (2006).


Students serving as tutors showed a substantially lower rate of growth than did tutees, boost-

ing their reading fluency at an average rate of about 0.5 additional words per instructional week.

The treatment ES for tutors also was less than half that of tutees. There are several possible

explanations for the slower rate of improvement experienced by tutors. First, in reading with

less-fluent tutees, tutors were rehearsing text at a level of difficulty that they had already mastered.One might predict, then, that they would benefit less in practicing this “easy” material than would

the tutee, for whom the text was matched to their instructional level. Second, a substantial number

(n 9) of the 27 tutors were found to read instructionally at a third-grade level while an even

larger number (n 12) were reading at or above the fourth-grade level at the onset of the study.

Again applying Fuchs et al.’s (1993) benchmarks for expected reading growth, we find that real-

istic goals for fluency growth are 1.0 word per instructional week for third grade and 0.85 words

per week for fourth grade. The rate of reading progress evidenced by tutors fell short of, but

approached, those of typical fourth-grade readers. It is likely, then, that tutors experienced a

slower rate of reading growth than tutees in part because they were more advanced readers to

begin with.

Limitations

One limitation of the present study is that we did not collect acceptability data on the tutoring

program from participating students and teachers. Future studies examining cross-age peer tutor-

ing should collect teacher and student feedback about the acceptability of the training, progress-

monitoring, and intervention components of this intervention. These acceptability data could then

be used to shape the program to increase its attractiveness to consumers in school settings.

A more significant limitation of the study is that it did not employ a control group of students

matched to the experimental group in reading skills, school setting, and demographic factors. The

opportunity to compare the reading growth of treatment and control students would have enabledus to separate the amount of increase in reading fluency that students derived from the peer

tutoring from that which could be attributed to classroom instruction or other factors.

Our decision not to use controls in this study was influenced in part by our prediction that

teachers participating in the study might perceive their use negatively. We judged that any deci-

sion to deliberately withhold a treatment from a member of a control group (standard practice in

basic educational research) would probably prove unpopular when the “treatment” was a reading

intervention and the control student was a child struggling in his or her current grade because

of chronic reading difficulties. Instead, we framed our investigation as an effectiveness study

(Kratochwill & Shernoff, 2004) designed to examine the degree to which a reading intervention

that had already demonstrated a treatment effect in highly controlled clinical settings would gen-eralize to applied educational settings such as classrooms. Although specific protocols have yet to

be published offering guidelines to practitioners about how to conduct school-based effectiveness

studies, it can be argued that such investigations are not always likely to include the full array of

scientific methodologies (e.g., use of randomized control trials) employed in basic educational

research. First, practitioners who wish to conduct research in schools often have limited funds and

personnel resources at their disposal, rendering large-scale treatment /control designs impractical.

Second, those conducting research in schools must deal sensitively with the attitudes and expec-

tations of teachers and other members of the school community as they apply their research

protocols.

There is some evidence, though, to support the hypothesis that the peer-tutoring intervention

did play a direct and meaningful role in helping to improve the reading speed of the children being

tutored. First, most of the tutees did not attend tutoring until after the third month that school had

been in session, providing classroom teachers with a substantial amount of lead time prior to the



7/17/2019 Wright, J. & Cleary, K. (2006).


start of the tutoring intervention to implement effective classroom instruction. Yet, a comparison

of mean reading-fluency rates obtained during baseline and treatment phases of the study col-

lapsed across four schools showed a substantial jump in average reading rates of tutees corre-

sponding with the onset of the tutoring intervention. Second, children were nominated by their

teachers to receive tutoring because they showed substantial delays in reading fluency in compar-ison to peers; however, during tutoring these tutees were found to match, or nearly match, typical

rates of reading growth for their grade placement (Fuchs et al., 1993).

Implementing Cross-Age Peer Tutoring: Recommendations for Schools

Despite the limited scope of this study, we believe that those interested in replicating this

cross-age peer-tutoring program or one of a similar design in their schools can draw the following

conclusions with some confidence:

1. Cross-age tutoring expands schools’ problem-solving capacity by tapping students as

intervention agents. Schools often find that they lack sufficient staff to spend very muchtime working one-on-one with marginal readers to improve their reading speed. Thisstudy illustrates that enlisting older elementary-age students to serve as tutors and train-ing them to use scripted, evidence-based interventions can significantly expand schools’capacity to give children with emerging reading delays valuable opportunities to buildfluency in basic academic skills.

2. Peer tutoring is likely to show results in improved reading fluency. The current study wasconducted in an urban district with relatively limited instructional resources, whose schoolsserve a diverse student population faced with poverty and other factors that put them atrisk for academic underachievement. Given that the cross-age peer-tutoring program wasable to demonstrate an apparent impact even in this challenging setting, other districtscan reasonably assume that they will likely realize results of at least the same magnitudeif they implement this tutoring program in their own schools.

3. A peer-tutoring program can find acceptance and attain success in schools with different cultures. Although the study was conducted in a single district, it was successfully imple-mented across four separate elementary schools. This success in different schools—eachpossessing its own unique culture, set of staff expectations, and leadership style—demonstrates that the procedures developed to organize and run the peer-tutoring pro-gram are adaptable to (and acceptable within) a range of elementary settings.

Lessons Learned in Launching a Cross-Age Peer-Tutoring Program: Guidelines for Schools

The full set of procedures used to set up and run the cross-age peer-tutoring program exam-

ined in this study (Wright, 2004) can be downloaded freely from the Internet. Here are additional

guidelines that can help schools to create a successful and self-sustaining tutoring program.

1. Educate teachers about the benefits of peer tutoring. We found in the course of our studythat teachers whose children were being tutored did not always fully appreciate that thetutoring program was a structured, evidence-based intervention specifically designed topromote reading fluency. Occasionally, teachers would even prevent students from par-ticipating in tutoring because of misbehavior or minor scheduling conflicts. Before begin-ning a peer-tutoring program, schools should educate instructors about the benefits of cross-age tutoring as an essential fluency-building intervention and secure from them acommitment not to treat tutoring as an optional reward or leisure activity.

2. Tap existing staff expertise and allocated problem-solving time. Some may regard thefact that we relied on trained graduate students to organize the peer-tutoring program,train tutors, match tutoring pairs, and collect progress-monitoring and treatment-

integrity data as a serious limitation of our effectiveness study. How could schools hopeto match this resource? When reading teachers, school psychologists, special educationteachers, and other educators who serve on school-based problem-solving teams pooltheir skills and work cooperatively, however, they are likely to discover that they have



7/17/2019 Wright, J. & Cleary, K. (2006).


sufficient technical expertise (e.g., ability to administer CBM) and time to create a viablepeer-tutoring program in their building without outside assistance. Indeed, if a schoolfinds that a large number of students are being referred to its problem-solving team forreading delays, investing in a peer-tutoring program may prove to be a cost-effective useof staff time when compared to the alternative of having to assemble individualizedfluency-building interventions for each student.

3. Be prepared to provide appropriate training and supervision to prevent student misbehav-iors. In two of the schools in our study, we discovered that a small number of studenttutors and tutees showed persistent behavior problems during peer-tutoring sessions.Schools can reduce the likelihood that students with behavioral concerns will be enrolledin tutoring by stressing to teachers that only those children with generally appropriatebehaviors are good candidates to be tutors or tutees. Schools with higher than averagenumbers of behavior problems throughout their buildings also may want to proactivelyprovide additional training to both tutors and tutees to ensure that an appropriate reper-toire of behaviors and reinforcement strategies are learned and can be used when work-ing together in largely independent settings.

4. Encourage your school’s prereferral intervention team to refer students for peer tutor-

ing. A number of schools have adopted prereferral intervention teams that follow a struc-tured problem-solving format to design intervention plans for students with academicand behavioral difficulties. One way to streamline the work of such teams while buildingtheir intervention capacity is to allow them to assign slow readers to reserved slots in analready-existing peer-tutoring program.

5. Provide teachers with periodic feedback about how their students are performing in thetutoring program. Site coordinators overseeing the peer tutoring at each of the schoolsinformally shared progress-monitoring charts with teachers at several points in the study.These charts documented student growth in reading fluency using CBM. It was reportedanecdotally that teachers found these charts to be helpful instructionally and highly moti-vating. Furthermore, the charts did much to promote the reputation of the tutoring program.

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Wright, J. (2004). Kids as Reading Helpers: A Peer Tutor Training Manual. Retrieved October 14, 2004, fromhttp://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/rdngfluency/prtutor.shtml

Appendix A

Treatment Integrity for Peer Tutoring Program

Preparing for Peer Tutoring Session

1. Sit in a quiet location without too many distractions. Y N N/A

2. Position the book selected for the reading session so that both students caneasily follow the text.

Y N N/A

Basic Procedures

3. Reader #1 (Tutor) reads aloud from the book for about 2 minutes while

Reader #2 (Tutee) reads silently.

Y N N/A

4. If Reader #1 commits a reading error or hesitates for longer than 3–5 sec-

onds, Reader #2 tells Reader #1 the correct word and has Reader #1 con-

tinue reading.

Y N N/A

5. Have Reader #2 read aloud the same material read by Reader #1 for up to 5

minutes.

Y N N/A

6. If Reader #2 commits a reading error or hesitates for longer than 3–5 sec-

onds, Reader #1 tells Reader #2 the correct word and has Reader #2 con-

tinue reading.

Y N N/A

7. Repeat steps 3 through 6 until the students have finished the selected pas-

sage or story.

Y N N/A

8. After the reader completes one page (1st through 3rd grade materials) or

paragraph (4 th grade materials), the tutor provides the tutee with positive

reinforcement.

Y N N/A

9. Students spend the majority of the session demonstrating appropriate, on-task

behavior.

Y N N/A

10. At the end of the session, students praise each other for a job well done (e.g.,Good job! Super! Awesome!).

Y N N/A

Total Step Completed Correctly

Total Steps (don’t count N/As) _______ _______ %



Documents

Wright, J. & Cleary, K. (2006)