Determining an effective intervention within a brief experimental analysis for reading: A meta-analytic review

The current study applied meta-analytic procedures to brief experimental analysis research of reading fluency interventions to better inform practice and suggest areas for future research. Thirteen studies were examined to determine what magnitude of effect was needed to identify an intervention as the most effective within a brief experimental analysis; what interventions led to the largest mean effect within brief experimental analysis; and whether effects were moderated by reading passage type. The mean no-assumptions effect size for the intervention identified as the most effective by a brief experimental analysis was 2.87 (SD = 2.68) with 81.83% (SD = 31.27%) mean percentage of non-overlapping data. Moreover, the average increase in words read correctly per minute was 30.19 (SD = 18.00). Mean percentage of nonoverlapping data was computed for 18 interventions and ranged from 24.75% to 100%. Finally, instructional-level passages led to larger average effects, but high-content overlap passages resulted in less variability in the data.