In January 2005 Perry Meridian Middle School introduced a “Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) with Intervention” project. We worked to develop a program that would be simple to implement and easy for teachers to follow.  What could we do that would be a valuable use of instructional time, engage our students, and gain support from our administration? 

      Teachers expressed concerns about how to deal with typical middle school student issues during free reading time (lack of interest, sleeping, mock reading, etc.) and we needed our own local data to prove that SSR would be valuable to the instructional day.  So four classroom teachers, the library media specialist, and the district reading coordinator jointly developed a model and established data collection procedures for one possible solution. 

      The objective was to improve student reading comprehension.  The classroom teachers piloted the project by including the following:

• closer monitoring of students to ensure all students are reading,

• engaging in one-on-one student-teacher conversations related to student’s reading,

• 10-20 minute SSR three to five times per week,

• SSR always concluding with a reading-writing prompt and students journaling in  a reading-writing-response log,

• teacher maintaining an SSR log with daily entries that included date, writing prompt for the day, anecdotal records of conversations with students, and notation of number of students exhibiting off-task behavior (not reading) during SSR.

      Student reading comprehension growth was measured with the NWEA Fall and Spring reading comprehension test.  In addition, pre and post project attitudinal surveys developed by the reading coordinator, student reading-writing-response logs, each classroom teacher’s instructor SSR log, and participating classroom teachers post project surveys were utilized.
      Dr. James Hatfield, MSDPT School Psychologist, analyzed the NWEA scores and based his results on RIT scores.  He found a “statistically significant difference, greater growth than would be expected from fall to spring in the scores of 7th grade participating students who had participated in the project.”  We had done it!  This had made a difference!  However, significant gains were not evident in the NWEA test scores of participating 8th grade students.  With further analysis of student populations in the two grades, we concluded that the 8th grade had a significant number of advanced and gifted and talented students which affected statistical results. 

       We compared students’ pre and post attitudinal survey data using Microsoft Excel.  According to the responses in the quantitative section of the survey, student post survey responses were more positive by approximately one point on a ten point scale.  Attitudes toward reading seemed to improve.  For example, Survey question 4, “During reading, I make note of personal connections in what the author says and what I think” received the greatest positive gain.  As one teacher commented on her post survey, “I believe most students’ reading behavior changed as they became more fluent and began to comprehend what they had read …They could not “fake” the writing prompt or my [oral] questions concerning the reading …”

      Also, classroom teachers felt strongly that the students’ reading-writing-response logs improved in quality.  They noted that as the project progressed there were increases in vocabulary, connection with text, and the quantity of words in the student reflections.  Teachers reported that students’ active participation in SSR increased to 100% by the end of February, just weeks after implementing the program.  According to one teacher’s post survey response, “I noticed students who said they didn’t like to read at the beginning became more engaged with whatever they were reading and began to ask questions that related to the text. Some of the students also recognized their own improvement …”

Simple steps for implementing SSR with Intervention in your classroom:

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