A heightened awareness of the need to improve reading instruction came in 1996 when President Clinton announced in his State of the Union Address that all children could read by the end of third grade. President Bush built on this national reading goal by implementing the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001.

The purpose of this study was to identify the extent to which a scripted phonics program, Sonday, and fluency activities, repeated reading and modeled, improve students' comprehension and words per minute scores. Subjects of this study were all third-grade students enrolled in the Valley Springs Elementary School, Valley Springs, South Dakota. Fifteen students were enrolled in the control classroom receiving phonics instruction and 15 students were enrolled in the experimental classroom receiving teacher-directed fluency activities. The research site was a lower- to middle-class predominantly Caucasian elementary school, with 22% of students receiving free or reduced lunch. A quasi-experimental nonequivalent control-group design was utilized.

Data were collected from the administration of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) as a pretest and posttest to both the experimental and control groups to investigate the effects a scripted phonics program and fluency activities had on the improvement of students' words per minute and comprehension scores. Analyses of covariance, t tests, and Pearson product moment correlations were utilized to respond to each research question to determine whether significant differences exist in adjusted posttest words per minute scores and comprehension between the two groups.

Significance was found in the improvement of words per minute scores and comprehension scores in the experimental group. Significance was also found in the improvement of words per minute scores of the control group, but no significance was found in the improvement of comprehension scores. There was no significant difference in words per minute or comprehension scores between the third-grade students receiving a scripted phonics program and those receiving teacher-directed fluency instruction. No significant relationship was found between improvements in words per minute scores and comprehension scores. There also was no significant difference in improvements of students' words per minute scores and comprehension scores between students receiving free and reduced lunch and those students who paid for lunch.