Exploring the Effectiveness of Student Topic Choice in Reading Fluency Interventions

Incorporating student choice is an effective intervention to improve task engagement that may also promote skill and behavioral generalization. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a reading fluency intervention that incorporated student choice of topic and instructional passages using a delayed multiple baseline across student design. Four fourth-grade students participated in an 8-week reading fluency intervention consisting of evidence-based reading fluency strategies (i.e., verbal cueing, repeated reading, modeling, error correction, goal setting, and performance feedback) implemented on student-selected passages. Results demonstrated reading fluency gains on instructional passages for all four students that generalized to untaught standardized passages for three of the students. Because reading is a difficult and low-frequency behavior for struggling students, allowing students to select reading topics and passages in intervention can reduce task difficulty via skill improvements while also introducing students to natural maintaining contingencies for reading behavior, potentially promoting generalization of reading behavior beyond intervention sessions.