Online paired reading and fourth-grade readers

The gist. One class moved a long-established reading strategy, pairing a stronger reader with a weaker one, onto a screen, and reported gains in reading fluency, comprehension and how learners felt about themselves as readers. It is an early signal about digital delivery, not proof: with only 22 learners, one term and no comparison class, an ordinary term's progress cannot be ruled out.

What the study found

Twenty-two fourth-graders, a mix of stronger and weaker readers, were paired up for online paired-reading sessions across the spring term of the 2023-2024 school year, for 36 lesson hours in total. Every learner sat the same reading checks before the programme and again afterwards. There was no separate class running without the online sessions to compare against.

Reading fluency and reading comprehension were measured with a curriculum-based measurement approach, and reading self-concept with the published Reading Self-Concept Scale (Chapman and Tunmer, 1995). The authors report a significant improvement in fluency and comprehension and a positive improvement in self-concept. The published abstract states these results in words, not numbers: no effect size or statistic is given for any of the three, and the full text sits behind a paywall we could not open.

What it might mean for your classroom

The pattern worth borrowing is not the specific tool this class used; the abstract never says what it was. It is the underlying idea that paired reading does not have to happen face to face to plausibly still work. If part of your class learns remotely or is split across sites, this early signal suggests it is worth trialling rather than assuming pairs must be in the same room. It sits alongside the wider toolkit of reading fluency and reading comprehension strategies you already use.

• Keep the core of paired reading intact, just move the room. Pair a stronger reader with a weaker one as you already would, and trial the same session online, with whatever tool you already trust, before assuming it needs to be face to face.
• Measure the same way, before and after, on your own class. Use a quick, repeatable fluency and comprehension check before and after a term of paired reading, so you see your own class's change, not someone else's.
• Ask learners how they feel as readers, not just how they score. A short confidence check at the start and end can surface a change a fluency score alone will not show, exactly as this study also tracked.

Treat it as an experiment, not a recipe: pair one small group of struggling readers online for a term and compare each learner's own start-of-term and end-of-term reading check, since this study had no comparison class to tell us what would have happened anyway.

How solid is this?

We grade this an early signal. It is a real, peer-reviewed study in a leading literacy journal, which counts in its favour, but the design is a one-group pretest-to-posttest quasi-experiment with no control class, the abstract reports direction only with no effect size or statistic, the sample is a single class of 22 learners, and we could review the abstract alone because the full text is paywalled with no open-access copy. Open full-text access, a matched-comparison design, or independent replication would raise the grade.

The source

Avşaroğlu, B. B. C., and Yıldız, M. (2025). An Example of Digital Transformation in Reading Instruction: The Effect of Online Paired Reading on Fourth Graders' Reading Outcomes. Reading Research Quarterly, 60(4), Article e70063.

Read the original study