The Influence of Text Difficulty on Children's Reading Comprehension Growth.

Significant progress has been made in designing beginning reading instruction for young children with reading disabilities (RD), but much less is known about children with RD in the intermediate grades who read very poorly despite several years of instruction and exposure to print. The aim of this research was to compare the influence of text difficulty (reading-ability matched or grade-level matched) on the growth of student's reading comprehension over the course of 18 weeks of one-to-one tutoring. Forty-six third through fifth grade poor readers, including twenty-five with high incidence disabilities, were randomly assigned to one of two tutoring. conditions, or to a control condition. Following tutoring, significant differences favored tutored children in all measured reading skills; however, the only significant difference between treatments was in reading fluency, which favored children who were tutored with text matched to their current reading ability. A subanalysis of the outcomes of the lowest skilled readers found differences favoring children in the reading-ability matched text in word identification and oral reading, as well as word attack. These findings have implications for decisions about how "special" a child's reading instruction should be to predict adequate growth. Contains 32 references, 2 tables, and 2 figures of data.' (Author/RS) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Reading Comprehension 1