School aged children today have grown up in a technology filled world, allowing discovery, learning and entertainment at their fingertips. “The twenty-first century classroom is heavily influenced by the use of information technology, such as students using computers in a computer lab on a limited basis, or in a more integraded approach whereby many students in a classroom have personal laptops, iPads, or other similar forms of technology” (Union, Union & Green, 2015, p. 71). The shift to a twenty-first century classroom is motivating and engaging for students, providing an authentic learning environment. Imagination Station (Istation) is an internet based reading intervention program supporting students in the area of reading. The program helps prevent emerging readers from falling behind and to support curriculum based learning in the classroom. Istation uses a tiered approach model which aligns with the three-tiered approach with Response to Intervention, or RtI. A seven week research study with five general education third grade students was conducted to determine if using Istation as a reading intervention would improve the over reading skills of students. (Dever, 2016). Overall, students showed improvement in their reading ability. Research states, “Constant use of the intervention fostered measurable change in overall reading skills in students, with varying …show more content…
As student strengthens phonemic awareness skills their fluency builds, allow students to focus deeper on comprehension skills than on decoding words. “Many teachers provide phonics instruction to students who struggle to learn to read to compensate for initial reading problems. Often, these students become accurate decoders, but fail to reach a level of sufficient fluency (automaticity) to become efficient readers” (Rasinski ed al. 2016, p. 161). A research design by Neddenriep, Fritz & Carrier was conducted using pretest and posttest to better understand the relationship between reading fluency and the correlation with comprehension at the students’ independent/instructional level. (Neddenriep, Fritz & Carrier, 2011) The research study was a 15 week period with five, general education fourth grade students using AIMSweb and MAZE benchmarks passages. The research included practice, performance feedback and error correction. Four out of the five students studied, demonstrated positive growth in comprehension. One student showed, “a 27% increase over his baseline performance and effect since of 1.19 resulting in his reading at a mastery level across the last three consecutive weeks of intervention” (Neddenriep, Fritz & Carrier, 2011, p. 20). Overall, students showed sustained improvements in comprehension during the reading fluency