The Effectiveness of the University of Florida Literacy Institute Intervention Program for Three First-Grade Students Struggling in Reading

Reading is foundational in the world of education, but a lot of students need help with reading and are below their grade’s standards. In 2022, 33 percent of fourth graders were at or above the proficiency level in reading defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP report card: Reading, n.d.). This project examined the use of the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI) intervention with three first-grade students who exhibited deficits in their reading. The intervention was delivered daily for thirty-minutes each session. This intervention focuses on phoneme blending and segmentation practice, accuracy and automaticity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, decoding automaticity of words with previously learned concepts, explicit introduction of new concepts, decoding and encoding practice, reading and spelling irregular words, and reading and spelling connected text. Data was collected using AIMSweb progress monitoring for oral reading fluency and nonsense word fluency.