RESEARCH AND ASSESSMENT
Students apply technology to facilitate a variety of effective assessment and research strategies, focusing on classroom-based educational research projects for their classrooms.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of PRESS interventions on fourth grade special education students’ reading fluency rates. My district was recently identified as a school that needed assistance through the differentiated accountability process. My district scored in the Intensive category for reading fluency with 58.72% of our student body not being proficient in reading fluency. In the state of Iowa, fourteen schools scored in this category, and the state decided to choose eleven schools to work with. Our district fell in the bottom eleven of all schools in Iowa for reading fluency proficiency. This was the first time our district had noticed such a need for improvement. Since returning from winter break, we have recently begun the process to address this issue. Teachers in our building decided on using PRESS (Path to Reading Excellence in School Sites) as our intervention curriculum. Seventeen out of my eighteen special education students have reading goals. This is the subject area in which I spend most of my day working to improve. I set out to examine how the added intervention time using PRESS impacted my students’ reading fluency rates.