Relationship between pre-intervention data and post-intervention reading fluency and growth: A meta-analysis of assessment data for individual students

Curriculum-based measurement is commonly used within a response-to-intervention framework to assess the effectiveness of intervention and to triage students into intervention tiers (e.g., the lowest 10% receive a Tier 3 intervention, and those in the 11th to 25th percentiles receive a Tier 2 intervention). We conducted a meta-analysis of 18 studies to examine the relationship between pre-intervention assessments and post-intervention level and growth in reading fluency. The results indicated that several pre-intervention measures were moderately related to post-intervention fluency, but only a percentage of comprehension questions answered during baseline assessments, reading fluency age or grade-based standard scores (SS), and word attack SS resulted in even a small to moderate relationship with reading growth. Moreover, there was no significant difference between the correlation of any two pre-intervention measures with reading growth, which suggested that all of the measures were equally poorly related to reading growth. Implications for research and practice are discussed.