Charting the Path to Equality in Literacy Instruction: A Precision Teaching Project in a Title-1 School

Educational equality is a critical component of social justice. Longstanding disparities in educational achievement and access to effective instruction have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This manuscript replicates and extends analyses of a behaviorally informed model of literacy instruction, Fit Lite®, pioneered by Sawyer et al. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 14, 623–630, (2020), which demonstrated significant improvements in reading proficiency among a cohort of marginalized students. The Fit Lite® model is a brief, intensive literacy intervention that incorporates empirically validated techniques, including precision teaching, repeated reinforced practice, and frequent progress monitoring with standardized assessments of oral reading skills. The current study includes a stronger demonstration of experimental control and involved 18 second-grade students in a rural Title-1 elementary school. The current findings verify the replicability of the model, with both iterations producing growth in oral reading skills greater than two percentile ranks per hour of instruction, based on US national normative assessment data. The potential for Fit Lite® and similar intervention packages for addressing educational inequity are discussed.

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