Response to intervention for high school students: examining baseline word reading skills and reading comprehension outcomes

The purpose of this post hoc analysis was to analyze if pre-intervention word reading skills contributed to intervention response on reading comprehension outcomes. High school students with reading difficulties were randomized to a business as usual (BaU) or treatment condition that provided 2 years of an intensive, multicomponent word reading and reading comprehension intervention. Participants were assessed on measures of word reading and reading comprehension for pretest and reading comprehension only for posttest. Findings revealed no statistically significant differences with word-level fluency modeled as a continuous variable between treatment and control on reading comprehension. Regardless of assignment to condition, higher word-level fluency scores predicted higher posttest outcomes on years 1 and 2 reading comprehension scores.