Many students are not prepared to meet the literacy demands of college and career as defined by the Common Core State Standards (2010). Literacy researchers have struggled to define the frequency and type of reading practice necessary to nurture the development of reading ability. The principles of deliberate practice provide a theoretical framework that could describe the type of practice necessary to develop expertise in reading. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between deliberate practice and reading ability. In this study, an educational technology, Learning Oasis, was used to deliver deliberate practice and monitor change in student reading ability over time. The hypotheses were that participants that engaged in more deliberate practice, as operationalized in this study, would experience more rapid growth and achieve higher levels of reading ability. Participants in this study (N = 1,369) ranged from grades one through twelve and were from a suburban school district in Mississippi. Each participant had at least three measurement occasions separated by at least three months each. The Lexile Framework for Reading was used to estimate participant reading ability during this research. Given the longitudinal nature of the data, a multilevel model was used to explore individual change over time. A negative exponential functional form was determined to best model change in participant reading ability over time. The results showed that, on average, participants that engaged in more deliberate practice (i.e., targeted practice with immediate feedback completed intensely over a long period of time) grew more rapidly and reached a higher ability level than participants that completed less deliberate practice. Implications for educators, educational technology designers, and researchers are discussed along with potential future areas of research.Doctor of Philosoph
