Native American secondary students have consistently scored lower in reading than other racial groups. Research has suggested that increasing student reading engagement and using a culturally-responsive pedagogy may help Native American students to improve reading levels. The problem addressed by this study is the need to identify best practices to help Native American secondary students increase their reading levels and become more engaged during the reading process. The researcher used TribalCrit as a methodology to design a culturally-sensitive program to provide reading intervention for Native American secondary students. That program included using a culturally-responsive pedagogy to identify self-relevant article topics for Native American students using the Achieve3000 computer-based reading program. This quantitative single-case study analyzed the effects of using Achieve3000 as designed by its creators and by pre-selecting self-relevant article topics. Student reading levels and reading engagement scores were measured before and after the twelve-week experiment. Participants included 68 Native American secondary students in 9th and 10th grade at a high school in rural Arizona. The researcher found that though student reading levels increased and reading engagement improved in some key areas, the treatment group did not improve at a statistically significant higher rate than the control group. The implications of these findings are that using a culturally-responsive pedagogy to select self-relevant materials for a computer-based reading program may help Native American students to increase their reading levels and reading engagement scores, but not at a significant rate. The researcher recommends that future research use mixed-methods to quantify and compare student perspectives in releationship to the implementation of culturally-responsive instruction during computer-based reading intervention. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
