Practice Makes Perfect: Increasing Reading Proficiency Through Sustained Silent Reading - a Quantitative Study

Abstract

There have only been moderate educational gains for American students in literary ability over the last thirty years. Increasing the time students spend reading is seen by some to be away to improve their literary skills. To this end, some teachers have implemented programs like Sustained Silent Reading (SSR). Previous research has not been unanimous on whether SSR works. Using a quantitative study, this paper looks at bolstering the argument for SSR and proving that SSR in the classroom improves a student's literary skills more than normally would occur. Using data collected from a sample of six ninth grade World Literature blocks at a Seattle public school, the study analyzes the student's RIT scores from the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to find a uniform pattern of growth — greater for the students whose teacher used SSR in the classroom than those whose teacher did not. The data measured the overall average RIT scores and the average RIT scores in five specific categories to find growth between the testing periods in each of the teacher's class blocks. The results did not reveal any uniform growth patterns or greater progress for SSR students compared to non-SSR students. However, the data does not disprove SSR's ability to increase literary skills. It only shows that the MAP test scores are not sufficient in accurately gauging SSR's affect on students because they do not isolate enough instructional variables or offer adequate comparisons for satisfactory cause and effect results. More research is needed to definitively prove SSR's capacity.