Flaws in the Denton Study Reviewed
by What Works Clearinghouse
The Carolyn Denton study, “The Effects of Two Tutoring Programs on the English Reading Development of Spanish-English Bilingual Students” published in the Elementary School Journal in 2004 used Read Naturally passages but did not follow Read Naturally’s recommended process and used assessment tools incongruous with the objectives of the Read Naturally strategy.
Specifically:
- The Denton study’s inclusion of oral discussion sessions of vocabulary and comprehension in the process would have reduced the time spent reading.
- The Denton study’s inclusion of vocabulary activities such as flash cards and pre-reading in the process would also have reduced the time spent reading.
- The students in the Denton study were not held accountable to Read Naturally’s four criteria to pass (reach goal rate, three or fewer errors, read with good expression, and answer all of the questions correctly). Students were not required to go back and master any of the criteria they failed on the first pass attempt. (Students achieving mastery in all four of the pass criteria is a critical element to success in the Read Naturally process.)
- The Denton study’s use of audio tapes was inconsistent. When the tutors—volunteer undergraduate students—read to the students, it would have been likely that the passages would be read at less than optimal rates. Also, they would not have had rate increase from the first to second read along and increase again from the second to third read along.
- The students in the study only had 22 sessions over a 10-week period. Read Naturally recommends a minimum of three sessions per week to be successful.
Denton Study Assessments Flawed
In addition to using Read Naturally passages but not the Read Naturally strategy, two of the three measures the Denton study used to evaluate student performance are not areas that Read Naturally claims to address. The Denton study used word identification from a list as one of the assessment tools. This is not part of the Read Naturally strategy. Instead, the Read Naturally strategy, if implemented correctly will improve fluency (rate, accuracy and expression) of reading words in context.
The second assessment measure, phonemic decoding, is also not part of the Read Naturally strategy and consequently even if the Read Naturally strategy would have been implemented correctly it would not have impacted phonemic decoding.
The third assessment component was comprehension. The comprehension assessment in the study was also flawed because there are no comprehension assessment tools that are sensitive enough to note improvements in only a 10-week period.
The What Works Clearinghouse titled its review "Read Naturally" in spite of the fact that the study did not use the prescribed Read Naturally strategy and that 67% of the assessment was in areas that Read Naturally does not claim to address.
Also, even though Read Naturally is regarded as the best fluency building program on the market that also improves comprehension and vocabulary, the study did not report on the fluency improvement of the students in the study.
"The measures used to evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction did not include measures of fluency," according to Dr. Jan Hasbrouck, one of the authors of the study. "Since Read Naturally is an intervention targeted at fluency, the measures used did not match the specific purpose and intent of the Read Naturally instruction given to the students in that group."