The Impact of a Tier 1 Intervention on Fifth and Sixth Graders’ Reading Comprehension, Reading Strategy Use, and Reading Motivation

Because reading comprehension is an important skill that many students struggle with, there is an urgent need to foster it. Few studies have investigated effective comprehension practices within a response-to-intervention design. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of a Tier 1 intervention implemented for 10 weeks on 491 fifth and sixth graders’ reading comprehension, strategy use, and motivation by means of multilevel analyses. The Tier 1 intervention included four effective comprehension practices: strategy instruction, peer-mediated instruction, reading motivation promotion, and differentiated instruction. Results revealed no significant effects on reading comprehension, but experimental condition students increased significantly more on recreational autonomous and controlled motivation and on monitoring strategies than students in the control condition. Furthermore, struggling experimental condition students reported using significantly more monitoring and evaluating strategies than their counterparts in the control condition.