The ability to read fluently is an important skill—one that is complex and difficult to remediate. A number of interventions have been used in the treatment of reading fluency problems, including the popular repeated reading intervention. In the repeated reading approach, a child reads the same passage aloud for a number of trials until a performance criterion is reached. Outcome data from empirical studies and meta-analyses suggest that repeated reading can, in fact, increase reading rates and accuracy in some children. Many questions remain, however, in terms of generalization of gains to unrelated texts. Moreover, few studies have examined the effectiveness of massed vs. distributed repeated reading. The current study compared the treatment effects and generalization of repeated reading (RR), high content overlap reading (HCO), and continuous novel reading (NR) in six children who were enrolled in second to fourth grade, and who received daily interventions over a period of four weeks. Further, RR and HCO were compared in the form of massed vs. distributed practice trials.

Results indicated that five of the six children consistently reached their highest reading rates under the RR condition. No clear benefit occurred for distributed versus massed practice. All conditions, including distributed variations, were generally found to yield higher reading rates and mean gains than if children read three unrelated texts in succession. Generalization of gains was greatest for the HCO condition, though generalization was only apparent at the word level, meaning that similar rates were found only for new passages containing similar content. None of the treatments appeared to affect performance on generalization probes which contained unrelated material.

Finally, the four weeks of fluency intervention generally resulted in faster (though not necessarily more accurate) reading on post-study word lists.