“As a former middle and high school special education teacher, I found that many of my students had decoding difficulty,” McFadden explained. “However, the research addressing how to teach decoding skills in the upper grades was very limited at the time.”
When McFadden enrolled in the Special Education Ph.D. program at Lehigh, these experiences as a practitioner informed her research focus.
Her qualifying project is a systematic review of word reading interventions for students with reading difficulty in Grades 4-12.
“The Lehigh University Alumni Association was incredibly supportive of my project, and their contributions to my crowdfunding campaign last spring made this work possible,” McFadden added.
The results of her study indicate that many word reading intervention studies report a positive effect on reading outcomes, but additional work is needed to maximize efficacy and to investigate the social validity of such interventions.
She will propose her dissertation in the fall, building on her qualifying project. McFadden plans to recruit a national sample of secondary special education teachers and investigate their knowledge and perceptions of word reading interventions for their students with reading difficulty.
