| Independent Reading (IR) is a reading intervention that many schools implement to help students develop essential reading skills and improve academic achievement on various standardized assessments. However, recent IR studies have yielded mixed findings on the effectiveness of IR as a reading intervention to help struggling students increase academic achievement. Thus, researchers agree that the findings on IR to date are insufficient to provide recommendations for practitioners and urge that additional studies be conducted on the correlation between IR and reading achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine if a significant difference in students' reading scores on the 4 th grade State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading test exists between IR groups and non-IR groups, thus providing insight into the effectiveness or lack thereof of IR. The research method employed for this study was quantitative with a causal comparative design. Homogenous groups of 4th graders from two Title 1 schools were selected for the study with all classrooms composed of similar student demographics. A total of 10 classrooms or approximately 190 students enrolled in 4 th grade during the 2014-2015 school year took part in the study. Five classrooms or about 100 students from school A that participated in IR during the language arts block comprised group A. The other 5 classrooms or approximately 90 students from school B who did not participate in IR comprised group B. T-tests were performed on SPSS version 23 to compare the applied intervention and the generated descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Based on the results of the study, IR did not improve the STAAR reading scores of 4th grade students who participated in IR as part of their language arts block. |
