Abstract
Expanding access to on-level texts provides students with more opportunities to practice reading and, in turn, accelerates progress toward improved reading fluency and reading comprehension. Independent reading without support, however, may not maximize potential learning gains.
Through E-readers and lesson guides, we provide a large selection of on-level content and well-crafted lessons that ensure students are actively participating and engaging with the text. We investigate whether interactive read alouds (IRAs), where teachers model higher-order thinking, can support the development of metacognitive connections and contribute to student mastery of inferential questions and general reading comprehension.
Through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 47 Nigerian private schools, we evaluate 641 lower elementary students’ performance on inferential reading comprehension. We find that interactive read alouds result in a 0.2 standard deviation increase in reading comprehension performance during a single term of instruction suggesting their overall effectiveness and potential for wider implementation.