Effects of Syntactic Skill Interventions on Passage- and Sentence-Level Reading Comprehension in Pre-K–12 Students: A Meta-Analytic Review

Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process that entails the ongoing integration of textual units, guided by syntactic structures, to construct a coherent representation of a text. Understanding complex sentence structures and applying syntactic knowledge to construct meaning are crucial for comprehending challenging texts. Although previous research has highlighted the significant relationship between syntactic awareness and text comprehension, the effects of syntactic skill interventions have received limited attention. This meta-analysis examined 40 empirical studies from 33 articles investigating the impact of syntactic skill interventions on students in grades pre-K–12. A total of 174 effect sizes, involving 15,784 students, were analyzed. Overall, the interventions were effective, with effect sizes of g  = 0.17 for passage-level comprehension, g  = 0.15 for sentence-level comprehension, and g  = 0.47 for syntactic knowledge. Effect sizes varied based on factors such as intervention characteristics (e.g., group format and syntactic diversity) and the participants’ grade levels and reading ability. Future research should explore more detailed interventions and participant characteristics to further clarify these effects.