Strategies for Developing a Research Program on Reading Comprehension
Written by: RAND Reading Study Group
In this report, the RAND Reading Study Group addresses the importance of contemplating current and future research methods. These crucial reflections must also include other important issues such as funding levels and funding sources and collaboration among various potential funding agencies.
The RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG) reports on four prerequisites for establishing successful and effective reading comprehension research programs. The four prerequisites are establishing priorities, building on strengths, improving the status of education research and choosing methods appropriate to the task.
Establishing priorities: Research programs should be judged by not only on the methods that are being used, but also on how the methods of the program are making improvements with classroom practice, curricula, teacher preparation and on how it provides additional informative assessments to provide data for the research.
Criteria-The high priority focus should be on research on instruction, on teacher preparation and on assessment.
Tensions- There is many tensions within establishing priorities. They include: tension between focusing on a specific age range versus a wider range; tension between priorities derived from our analysis of research and practice and priorities determined by other factors such as political influences; tension between research that is well embedded in existing knowledge and theory and research that is truly innovative; tension between immediate payoff and longer-term research efforts; and tension between preplanned and emergent research priorities.
Building on Strengths: The past 25 years of research has enhanced reading instruction in primary grades in the United States. The primary focus of past research has been on understanding the development of word reading and using this understanding to develop interventions for students that have difficulty with word reading. The RRSG states that a focus on reading comprehension is now in order. By providing instruction in vocabulary, oral language production, writing, text analysis and other important factors that lead to reading comprehension, researchers will be providing valuable tools to assist students with in depth reading comprehension.
Improving the Status of Educational Research: Even before addressing the next crucial steps for future research, The RRSG suggests educational research programs must first address growing doubts with the quality, relevance and usefulness of current research. The following three areas need to be addressed when developing new research.
Ensure programmatic efforts- Changes need to be based on well-replicated findings consistent with broader theoretical understandings instead of the results of a single study or fancy new idea.
Develop a community of researchers-Linguistic, sociolinguistics, discourse processing, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive scientists as well as other distinct field members need to work together, collaboratively forming a community of reading researchers linked by their common intellectual focus.
Make both research-and practice-based knowledge optimally usable for all-Work on current reading practices need to be shared at all levels in such places as journals and research proposals so that knowledge is sufficiently incorporated in the classroom as soon as possible. Mechanisms for distinguishing excellent from mediocre practice should also be implemented.
Methods Appropriate to the Task-Methods that have proven useful to advancing educational research are 1. experimental and quasi-experimental designs; 2. structural equation modeling; 3. hierarchical linear modeling; 4. meta-analysis in experimental research; 5. discourse analysis; 6. video analysis; 7. classroom observational analysis; 8. verbal protocol analysis.
Direct, explicit strategy instruction has been proven to show promising results in studies.
SEM-Structural equation modeling-when investigators examine concealed variables to get valid and reliable measures of instructional variables to measure classroom constructs, student characteristics, and student achievement outcomes.
HLM-Hierarchical linear modeling- when investigators eliminate variance in achievement attributable to unwanted sources. When working with large data sets, or with quasi-experimental designs, variance in outcome variables that are not experimentally controlled can be statistically removed from the classroom instructional effects that are of theoretical importance (pg. 1562).
Both SEM and HLM allow investigators for develop growth variables reflecting the slope and curvature of student improvement in reading comprehension or other things such as reading motivation or content knowledge gleaned while reading.
Methodologies overlap to a large extent, there is not intrinsic ranking of values, high levels of rigor can be defined for any form of disciplined inquiry and methodologies can be assessed only with reference to the research questions they are being used to answer, so it is not always possible to make clear-cut divisions across types of methodologies.
The Research Infrastructure: Organizing for Programmatic Research or Reading Comprehension-Procedures for getting from here to there also need to be put into place. Decisions on how Requests for Applications (RFAs) will be researched and written, who should serve on review panels, and how the accumulation of research findings will be monitored to serve as input need to be investigated. The following list indicates ways in which the organizational structure of education research funding needs to go.
1. Leadership and professionalism for long-term planning. A. A director should be named to oversee this initiative and related reading projects. B. the director should interact and collaborate with individuals across the various federal research organizations involved. C. the director should interact with the field, help with developing proposals, and help synthesize the knowledge base that will emanate from this and other federally sponsored reading research initiatives. D. the director should not be responsible for review.
2. Coordination-coordination between various federal agencies needs to take place. Currently funding for R & D activities for reading comprehension is lacking among federal agencies that support educational research.
3. Sustainability-continual, long-term support and funding needs to be applied for reading comprehension research. Funding needs to cut across administrations and political constituencies. Some specific steps can be taken to assure this happens.
A. Regular syntheses- Procedures for accumulating, reviewing and synthesizing knowledge developed through funded research could be built into a funding effort.
B. Talent development- The design of a research training fellowship and developmental grant programs for initial investigators, should be put into place.
C. Coordinated solicitations- Long-term plans that provide a mix of short-term, medium-term and long-term goals should be established with a reading comprehension agenda. Various grants should be supported.
D. Development- The development of curricula, software, and instructional programs based on the research needs to happen.
E. Sufficient funding- A significantly greater level of funding is needed than is currently available for reading comprehension research. To improve comprehension, a systematic, research-based way will demand a substantial increase in basic knowledge about the reading comprehension processes and large-scale efforts to implement and evaluate improved instructional, teacher preparation, and professional development programs needs to happen.
Final note: Currently the U.S. government invests between 2% and 3% of all national expenditures to R & D. Only 0.3% of the money focuses on K-12 education!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Chapter 52
Literacy Research in the Next Millennium: From Paradigms to Pragmatism and Practicality written by Deborah R. Dillon, David G. O’Brien, and Elizabeth E. Heilman
What would it be like for researchers, educators, students, parents, and state, local and federal government if current literacy research was driven by a collaborative group of interested parties? Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman start to pave the road for a new direction for literacy research in the new millennium.
Dillon, O’Brein, and Heilman begin with addressing past trends in literacy research and how each particular group of researchers has their own ideas and theories that guide their research. The authors list three classes of scholars that participate in literacy research.
1. The first group tries to foresee the latest “buzz word” (topic), attitudes (methodology), and standards (paradigm). They pay little attention to what has been done in the past because researchers are generally rewarded for “new” ideas and are often labeled leaders in the field when “inventing” new genres, buzz words, directions and attitudes. The result is often more available grant money and articles for publishing based on the “new” ideas, as well as the enhancement of their reputation as a scholar.
2. The second group tries to use one “groundbreaking” idea as the foundation of their research. They investigate their idea from various angles over a long period of time.
3. The third group focuses on collaboratively identifying a problem with participants in a community and work together over time to generate theories and explanations that can be used in local settings. This group is often driven by one particular position or issue and is philosophically and ethically driven to find an answer to their identified problem.
The authors use Kuhn’s work to help define paradigm. A paradigm is defined as “a conceptual system, clearly separate from other conceptual systems, with a self-sustaining, internal logic, constituted as a set of epistemological rules directed as solving problems matched to the logic and rules (pg. 1532).” When looking up paradigm in the thesaurus for clarity, such words as example, model, pattern, standard, archetype, exemplar and prototype are found. So, to say it more succinctly, a paradigm is a new standard with its own rules. Paradigms often use politically visible national panels and policymakers to attempt to force compliance to a “party line”. In doing so, researchers are not always driven by systematic testing and rethinking of theoretical perspectives, but by political dominance and power of one group or community over another.
Paradigm shifts occur throughout research. These shifts often are driven by problems that cannot be solved within the constraint of a particular paradigm. Four layers of paradigms are listed within the article. They are:
Ontology: the nature of reality. Ontological assumptions get at what people believe and understand to be true. They address the nature of the social world or subject matter that drives the direction or focus of the research.
Epistemology: ways of knowing what is true. Epistemological assumptions are those that people hold about the basis of knowledge, the form it takes, and the way in which knowledge may be communicated to others. Assumptions often happen based on the social history of a specific group and are often biased (racially).
Axiology: basic beliefs that form the foundation of conceptual or theoretical systems; central beliefs that involve what is right and wrong or morality and values.
Methodology: ways of understanding research including positions, models, concepts, methods and ideas that form the selection of a particular set of data-collection techniques and analysis strategies.
M. Q. Patton: when one is looking at paradigms, it is important to note what a particular research group’s beliefs, values, assumptions and practices are in order to fully understand the direction or outcome of that particular research. One must work within a paradigm, but must also bring in new frameworks, methods, and tools to better address the research questions at hand; one must think outside of the box and be flexible.
D. Polkinhorne: one should work within an existing paradigm and adjust research questions within it; one must be less flexible and stay within the box.
Paradigm shifts in 1960’s occurred when scholars in other fields such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics began to show an interest in reading. Some other research in this century includes an early focus on perception in the 1910s; case studies of the 1920s; evaluation and behaviorism of the 1930s; reading comprehension defined by psychometrics and factor analysis of the 1940s; experimental research with accompanying hypothesis testing and statistical tests of the 1950s and 60s; to the most current work by scholars including psychology, linguistics, sociology, and medicine.
P. B. Mosenthal worked from T. Kuhn’s work on paradigms and explored three different approaches to defining progress in research and stresses that each group of researchers has their own agenda and beliefs that guide them.
Literal approaches- when researchers work really hard within a chosen paradigm to tweak existing theories, find new features and discover glitches within the paradigm and come up with new concepts. They combine these new concepts to be more comprehensive than was originally developed.
Interpretive approaches-when researchers abandon the experimental definitions and reality in favor of the belief that reality is constructed; they change their minds based on what they have found.
Evaluative approaches- ideological implications of inquiry for society are central to the researcher’s work.
Some paradigms are not embraced by the research community because they do not abide by current trends or beliefs. In fact, some paradigms have been scorned by the research community, only to be “rediscovered” at a later date.
Ray McDermott was a scholar before his time. McDermott began looking at anthropological theories and methods to investigate the social reproduction of minority-community pariah (outsider) status among poor children in school and how this pariah/hose relationship plays out in the social organization of reading instruction.
Based on the above, this article points to the deficiencies of only using paradigms to shape the direction of research. Pragmatism is a viable alternative. Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy and a new way of approaching old problems in several diverse fields (e.g., law, social thought, and literary theory). The term pragmatism has been avoided by many educational philosophers and researchers due to negative undertones. Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman are advocating for the spirit of the pragmatic tradition which emphasizes that conducting inquiry to useful ends takes precedence over finding ways to defend one’s epistemology. Researchers are often more worried about their theoretical positions than about answering important questions. The pragmatic methods are not a way to get certain results, but rather, an “attitude of orientation” that looks beyond principles toward consequences and facts. The investigation process suggested by a pragmatic stance is quite different from traditional investigation in which a researcher comes up with a questions or problem and proceeds without the integration of nonexpert opinion. When researchers use interpretive methods to understand how a particular teacher and student work together to support learning, they are viewed as less scientific and less credible in the terms of their processes and results.
Pragmatics avoids the use of political entities in government and elsewhere; the struggle for grant monies and jobs; the human need to feel that one has made a mark in the field; and paradigm debates resulting in literacy research that has not made the difference it could in practice. Pragmatism feels the research community needs to regroup and consider pooling their considerable intellectual resources to better serve the greater community.
Positive pragmatism changes that need to be made by the research community for the future include:
Dimension #1: Building Communities of Inquiry
*The creation of partnerships with university staff, K-12 teachers and administrators, parents, students, and members of the community would glean valuable information for specified purposed through collaboration. Seven key elements are responsiveness, respect for partners, academic neutrality, accessibility, integration, coordination and resources partnership.
*Partners as advocates for learners-using the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) as role models to assist with making positive, collaborative changes in literacy research.
Dimension #2: Moral Obligation in the Selection of Research Problems
*The formulation of research problems should take more time. Problems should be carefully outlined and the actual problem and its dimensions need to be identified and then addressed.
*Developing multiple, connected research initiatives through developing a set of critical problems, generated by a diverse group of stakeholders, that are foundational to large-scale research projects with multiple sites and community inquiry teams; developing a set of critical problems generated at the local level by community inquiry teams; and collectively identifying problems that interest individual researchers and that can be parsed into various facets to be addressed by individual expertise.
*Keeping the end in view when designing research by asking questions. What do we hope to achieve at the end of the study? Why is this end important to learners?
Dimension #3: Reconsidering Traditions, Methodologies, and How We Communicate Findings.
*The use of multiple traditions within a study to solve problems.
*The purity of traditions and methodologies vs. quality of use.
*Considering new traditions and methodologies.
*Communicating the findings of research.
Overall, Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman start to pave the road for a new direction for literacy research in the new millennium. They challenge the literacy community by promoting the idea of adopting pragmatism with regard to new literacy research. The authors point out past practices in selecting questions, and formulating inquiry approaches need to be adapted for future research. The authors propose a revolutionary break in our thinking and practice relating to inquire. They point to pragmatic research for the new millennium and suggest that this new collaborative way for literacy research may glean positive, significant results.
What would it be like for researchers, educators, students, parents, and state, local and federal government if current literacy research was driven by a collaborative group of interested parties? Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman start to pave the road for a new direction for literacy research in the new millennium.
Dillon, O’Brein, and Heilman begin with addressing past trends in literacy research and how each particular group of researchers has their own ideas and theories that guide their research. The authors list three classes of scholars that participate in literacy research.
1. The first group tries to foresee the latest “buzz word” (topic), attitudes (methodology), and standards (paradigm). They pay little attention to what has been done in the past because researchers are generally rewarded for “new” ideas and are often labeled leaders in the field when “inventing” new genres, buzz words, directions and attitudes. The result is often more available grant money and articles for publishing based on the “new” ideas, as well as the enhancement of their reputation as a scholar.
2. The second group tries to use one “groundbreaking” idea as the foundation of their research. They investigate their idea from various angles over a long period of time.
3. The third group focuses on collaboratively identifying a problem with participants in a community and work together over time to generate theories and explanations that can be used in local settings. This group is often driven by one particular position or issue and is philosophically and ethically driven to find an answer to their identified problem.
The authors use Kuhn’s work to help define paradigm. A paradigm is defined as “a conceptual system, clearly separate from other conceptual systems, with a self-sustaining, internal logic, constituted as a set of epistemological rules directed as solving problems matched to the logic and rules (pg. 1532).” When looking up paradigm in the thesaurus for clarity, such words as example, model, pattern, standard, archetype, exemplar and prototype are found. So, to say it more succinctly, a paradigm is a new standard with its own rules. Paradigms often use politically visible national panels and policymakers to attempt to force compliance to a “party line”. In doing so, researchers are not always driven by systematic testing and rethinking of theoretical perspectives, but by political dominance and power of one group or community over another.
Paradigm shifts occur throughout research. These shifts often are driven by problems that cannot be solved within the constraint of a particular paradigm. Four layers of paradigms are listed within the article. They are:
Ontology: the nature of reality. Ontological assumptions get at what people believe and understand to be true. They address the nature of the social world or subject matter that drives the direction or focus of the research.
Epistemology: ways of knowing what is true. Epistemological assumptions are those that people hold about the basis of knowledge, the form it takes, and the way in which knowledge may be communicated to others. Assumptions often happen based on the social history of a specific group and are often biased (racially).
Axiology: basic beliefs that form the foundation of conceptual or theoretical systems; central beliefs that involve what is right and wrong or morality and values.
Methodology: ways of understanding research including positions, models, concepts, methods and ideas that form the selection of a particular set of data-collection techniques and analysis strategies.
M. Q. Patton: when one is looking at paradigms, it is important to note what a particular research group’s beliefs, values, assumptions and practices are in order to fully understand the direction or outcome of that particular research. One must work within a paradigm, but must also bring in new frameworks, methods, and tools to better address the research questions at hand; one must think outside of the box and be flexible.
D. Polkinhorne: one should work within an existing paradigm and adjust research questions within it; one must be less flexible and stay within the box.
Paradigm shifts in 1960’s occurred when scholars in other fields such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics began to show an interest in reading. Some other research in this century includes an early focus on perception in the 1910s; case studies of the 1920s; evaluation and behaviorism of the 1930s; reading comprehension defined by psychometrics and factor analysis of the 1940s; experimental research with accompanying hypothesis testing and statistical tests of the 1950s and 60s; to the most current work by scholars including psychology, linguistics, sociology, and medicine.
P. B. Mosenthal worked from T. Kuhn’s work on paradigms and explored three different approaches to defining progress in research and stresses that each group of researchers has their own agenda and beliefs that guide them.
Literal approaches- when researchers work really hard within a chosen paradigm to tweak existing theories, find new features and discover glitches within the paradigm and come up with new concepts. They combine these new concepts to be more comprehensive than was originally developed.
Interpretive approaches-when researchers abandon the experimental definitions and reality in favor of the belief that reality is constructed; they change their minds based on what they have found.
Evaluative approaches- ideological implications of inquiry for society are central to the researcher’s work.
Some paradigms are not embraced by the research community because they do not abide by current trends or beliefs. In fact, some paradigms have been scorned by the research community, only to be “rediscovered” at a later date.
Ray McDermott was a scholar before his time. McDermott began looking at anthropological theories and methods to investigate the social reproduction of minority-community pariah (outsider) status among poor children in school and how this pariah/hose relationship plays out in the social organization of reading instruction.
Based on the above, this article points to the deficiencies of only using paradigms to shape the direction of research. Pragmatism is a viable alternative. Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy and a new way of approaching old problems in several diverse fields (e.g., law, social thought, and literary theory). The term pragmatism has been avoided by many educational philosophers and researchers due to negative undertones. Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman are advocating for the spirit of the pragmatic tradition which emphasizes that conducting inquiry to useful ends takes precedence over finding ways to defend one’s epistemology. Researchers are often more worried about their theoretical positions than about answering important questions. The pragmatic methods are not a way to get certain results, but rather, an “attitude of orientation” that looks beyond principles toward consequences and facts. The investigation process suggested by a pragmatic stance is quite different from traditional investigation in which a researcher comes up with a questions or problem and proceeds without the integration of nonexpert opinion. When researchers use interpretive methods to understand how a particular teacher and student work together to support learning, they are viewed as less scientific and less credible in the terms of their processes and results.
Pragmatics avoids the use of political entities in government and elsewhere; the struggle for grant monies and jobs; the human need to feel that one has made a mark in the field; and paradigm debates resulting in literacy research that has not made the difference it could in practice. Pragmatism feels the research community needs to regroup and consider pooling their considerable intellectual resources to better serve the greater community.
Positive pragmatism changes that need to be made by the research community for the future include:
Dimension #1: Building Communities of Inquiry
*The creation of partnerships with university staff, K-12 teachers and administrators, parents, students, and members of the community would glean valuable information for specified purposed through collaboration. Seven key elements are responsiveness, respect for partners, academic neutrality, accessibility, integration, coordination and resources partnership.
*Partners as advocates for learners-using the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) as role models to assist with making positive, collaborative changes in literacy research.
Dimension #2: Moral Obligation in the Selection of Research Problems
*The formulation of research problems should take more time. Problems should be carefully outlined and the actual problem and its dimensions need to be identified and then addressed.
*Developing multiple, connected research initiatives through developing a set of critical problems, generated by a diverse group of stakeholders, that are foundational to large-scale research projects with multiple sites and community inquiry teams; developing a set of critical problems generated at the local level by community inquiry teams; and collectively identifying problems that interest individual researchers and that can be parsed into various facets to be addressed by individual expertise.
*Keeping the end in view when designing research by asking questions. What do we hope to achieve at the end of the study? Why is this end important to learners?
Dimension #3: Reconsidering Traditions, Methodologies, and How We Communicate Findings.
*The use of multiple traditions within a study to solve problems.
*The purity of traditions and methodologies vs. quality of use.
*Considering new traditions and methodologies.
*Communicating the findings of research.
Overall, Dillon, O’Brien and Heilman start to pave the road for a new direction for literacy research in the new millennium. They challenge the literacy community by promoting the idea of adopting pragmatism with regard to new literacy research. The authors point out past practices in selecting questions, and formulating inquiry approaches need to be adapted for future research. The authors propose a revolutionary break in our thinking and practice relating to inquire. They point to pragmatic research for the new millennium and suggest that this new collaborative way for literacy research may glean positive, significant results.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Chapter 56: Literacy for All CHildren In the Increasingly Diverse Schools of the United States
The article, “Literacy for All Children in the Increasingly Diverse Schools of the United States,” by Claude Goldenberg discusses eight ambitious goals t he United States has committed to for the year 2000. Three goals in particular are the focus of this chapter. They are:
1. Goal 1-All children will begin school “ready to learn”.
2. Goal 3-All students will leave grades 4, 8 and 12 demonstrating competency
over challenging subject matter.
3. Goal 8-Every school will promote parent involvement to support the social,
emotional, and academic growth of children.
There is strong interrelation among these goals. School readiness predicts school success, and parent involvement has deep implications in both. The literacy experience along with the skills students begin school with will influence their literacy development and a big part of this is parent involvement. Parents are the forerunners of their child’s literacy experience. That is, they influence how much experience their children have with books and other reading materials, familiarity with letter and sounds, their vocabulary development, and even their reading and writing habits. The children’s’ experiences and opportunities in and outside of school also play an important role in their literacy development. All this will help lay the foundation for success later in school and in life; in order to ensure this we need to engage parents as partners in education.
This chapter focuses on environmental factors: the sorts of experiences schools and families can provide that will enhance literacy development for all children. With the previously mentioned goals, this is a lofty challenge for the US to consider when at the end of the 20th Century there were nearly 19 million children under age 5 and nearly 40 million more were between the ages of 5 and 14. This seems even more challenging when the Census predicts that by the end of the 21st century these numbers will nearly double to 36 million and 72 million, respectively.
In order to make schools work for all students, attaining these education goals is essential. One question that is on the minds of researchers is how to do this for children from low-income families who are linguistically and culturally different from the U.S. mainstream. Especially since each year, they make up a greater percentage of the US population. While there are no simple answers, some answers are found on a wide range of considerations. These considerations deal with the nature of early literacy and how best to promote it; the influence of SES, language, and culture on children’s formal schooling; and what home–school connections or partnerships can and should be.
One controversial topic in education focuses on questions that center around what early literacy is and how children learn to read, which are central to the goals previously stated. Research done by Alexander & Entwisle; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill shows that children from low-income families are more dependent on school experiences for academic literacy development than middle class children. There is not the lack of literacy experience for low-income children in their homes; it is because their experiences are more limited than that of middle class children.
Another dimension of this controversy is the classic dilemma of how much emphasis to put on letters and sounds and their combination in forming words. The significance of this controversy comes from the reprinting of Reading Research Quarterly’s “First Grade Studies,” which demonstrates the importance of “code” emphasis in beginning reading instruction. This is also coincided with another controversy about preschool years. This is where the importance of phonological awareness as an important component to learning how to read became an issue. While there is agreement on its’ importance, there is not so much agreement on how to use it in practical application.
Supporters of strong training in both phonics and phonological awareness will recommend different practices to achieve the goal of literacy. Two different types of perspectives are sociocultural, developmentalist and cognitive-linguistic. A sociocultural, developmentalist perspective on literacy puts emphasis on the importance of meaningful and functional literacy experiences, while a cognitive-linguistic perspective puts emphasis on the critical role of phonological knowledge in learning to read. Although these perspectives are contrasting, work is being done to forge a broad consensus about what literacy is and how to best promote it.
A successful literacy program will address each of the components necessary to read and write. This will promote literacy growth in the earliest and later years. Optimal instruction will vary by learner and stage of literacy development, but the basic ingredients of a healthy literacy diet are the same for all children (and adults) learning to read an alphabetic language Effective instructional practices to promote emergent and beginning literacy for all children include the following:
• Literate environments
• Direct, explicit, systematic instruction in specific skills that will
Promote transfer and automaticity
• Discussions and conversations about books
• focus on word-recognition skills and strategies
• Strategically sequenced instruction and curriculum materials
• Organizational and classroom management strategies to maximize academic
engagement and appropriate use of materials
• an explicit focus on language development
• Valid and frequent assessments to allow teachers to gauge development and
target instruction appropriately
• Parental involvement (home–school connection)
There are several interrelated factors bearing on children’s literacy development.
They are:
Socioeconomic Status- This is central to the discussion of how schools can meet the needs of low-income students and their families. Studies (Baker et al., 1995) have found that students from low-income homes have fewer opportunities for interactions involving literacy, than students from middle-class homes.
Language- This plays a large part in education as in the United States, there is a disproportionate number of children from certain ethnolinguistic groups. This is in conflict with the matter that may of these groups that are from low-income households. The debate of how to best instruct English Language Learners is rampant, should it be in their primary language or treated as a second language?
Culture- Even the method of instruction is different in other cultures and this plays a role in American instruction as this could be perceived in an ill manner. This is due to how the children in each culture are socialized. This causes issue when the style is different from that of the teacher.
Educators have been exploring numerous avenues to improve outcome, in particular literacy outcomes since at least the 1990’s. There are several types of programs and interventions undertaken to try to address the literacy achievement gap between low- and higher-income students. The following are some programs that have seen success.
Parent Involvement and Parent Training- Since home life affects school life, it is important for parents to take interest in their children’s lives at school. The more teachers attempt to involve parents, the better parents feel. The training is a firm ground for parents and will enhance their involvement in their children’s learning.
Tutoring- The ultimate in focused, targeted instruction. Tutoring is the ideal program. It is however restricted by funds and time. It is actually an old form of teaching that dates back further than group-based teaching, which is now considered the norm. Bloom suggests tutoring is the most effective instructional arrangement. He continues saying that compared to regular classroom instruction involving one teacher and roughly 30 students, effective tutoring raises student achievement by 2 standard deviations. Some examples of tutoring programs are Reading Recovery, the Howard Street Model, and Book Buddies.
Comprehensive School Based Efforts- This is an attempt to influence numerous aspects of child’s environment simultaneously. Sometimes these models incorporate tutoring in them. One program that follows the comprehensive model is Success for All.
The end of the article mentions implications and future directions. Here the question becomes “What is to be done if these goals become attainable?” The first step is to put into practice instruction and intervention programs that work. Tutoring and comprehensive programs suggests productive areas but are not being utilized in enough places. One of the biggest obstacles to this is cost. While just as important as the latter information, effective instructional practices for the classrooms should be more prevalent than they are currently. Beyond this, there is a ubiquitous need for further research.
In conclusion, the US, as a nation, has committed itself to all children beginning school ready to learn, attaining competency in subject areas, and increasing parental involvement that will help our children to succeed. We need to keep striving towards this so we can see success for all students regardless of other situations in their lives.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Chapter 55
Chapter 55
“The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture”
Lorrie A. Shepard examines the role of assessments and how they can be use as part of the teacher’s instruction to support and enhance learning. She has organized her article into three sections: 1) a historical framework; 2) social-constructivist conceptual framework; and 3) ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support social-constructivist the method and practice of teaching.
1. Shepard creates a set of three interlocking circles that demonstrates the central ideas of social efficiency and scientific management in curriculum were linked to hereditarian theories of intelligence and associationist/behaviorist learning theories.
o Social Efficiency- modern principles of scientific management could be applied to not only factories, but equally to schools; task analysis of skills to be taught; mastery of each skill; scientific measures to determine future role in life and appropriate curriculum or differentiated curriculum for the role, don’t teach what they will never use.
o Hereditarian Theory of IQ- IQ as innate and fixed;
Associationist and Behaviorist Learning Theories- Concept of mind is
replaced by stimulus-response (Skinnerism), learning occurs by an
accumulation of atomized bits of knowledge, learning is sequenced and
hierarchical, each objective must be explicitly taught, testing to ensure mastery
before moving on, tests correspond with learning, motivation is external and
based on positive reinforcement of many small steps.
o Scientific Measurement- tracking through IQ testing, objective tests to measure achievement. Shepard continues discussion about objective tests and how they were first developed test what was important to learn. To this day, this type of testing affects teachers’ beliefs about the nature of evidence and principles of fairness. Testing was separate from instruction and was uniformly administered. Formative testing or holistic evaluations were worrisome for teachers due to the subjectivity involved.
2. Shepard continues by discussing the principles of a ‘social-constructivist’ conceptual framework.
o Cognitive and Constructivist Learning Theories- Concept of mind is reintroduced and that learning is an active process of mental construction and sense making; prior knowledge and beliefs work to enable or impede new learning; intelligent thought and learning involves metacognition; expertise or a deep understanding is developed, not just an accumulation of information; cognitive abilities are developed through socially and culturally supported interactions.
o Reformed Vision of Curriculum- All students can learn; challenging content aimed at higher-order thinking and problem solving; equal opportunity for divers learners, genuine opportunities for high-quality instruction; classroom routines and the socialization between teachers and students should help students in the ways of thinking and speaking in academic disciplines; authentic learning and connected to the real world, foster development of dispositions, perseverance in trying to solve difficult problems.
o Classroom Assessment- Elicit higher-order thinking and problem solving; addresses learning processes as well as the learning outcomes; ongoing process that is integrated with instruction; used formatively; student understand expectations and are active in evaluating their own work; used to evaluate teaching as well as learning.
3. Shepard describes ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support social-constructivist the method and practice of teaching. Assessments need to be more open-ended so that students can apply their knowledge to real life situations. Assessments need to reflect metacognition development, dispositions, and the levels at which students have been socialized into the discourse and practices of content areas. Shepard lists several methods for gathering data: observations, clinical interviews, reflective journals, projects, demonstrations, portfolio work, and student’s self-evaluations. Teachers must use systematic analysis of the evidence.
• In Shepard’s next section, she describes the negative effects of standards-based reform but also the use of assessment for learning. The author proposes changes in classroom practices so that students can no longer fake their level of competency. Shepard discusses several specific assessment strategies that should be part of a more fundamental shift in classroom practices and learning expectations.
o Dynamic, Ongoing Assessment- should be moved to middle of the teaching and learning process to determine what student is able to do independently (Vygotsky) and allow the teacher to reshape their teaching process.
o Prior Knowledge- reexamining to take into account knowledge in social and cultural contexts and then using this information to first, shape instruction, and second, use as an activation technique (K-W-L).
o Feedback- when done correctly, leads to self-correction and learner improvement while maintaining motivation and self-confidence.
o Transfer- more likely if students have practiced with a variety of applications and new situations.
o Explicit Criteria- clear understanding of the criteria by which their work will be assessed. Features should be so ‘transparent’ that students can evaluate their own work at the same level that the teacher would have.
o Self-Assessment- increases collaboration between teacher and student, increases student responsibility and ownership.
o Evaluation of Teaching- using assessments, whether formal, informal, or on-going to adjust teaching while modeling to students why they are changing their lesson.
• In conclusion, Shepard states that teachers need to be able to ask the right questions at the right time, anticipate conceptual pitfalls, have a ready repertoire of tasks that will lead to a student’s deeper understanding of subject matter, learn to use assessment in new ways, need a theory of motivation, knowledge of how to develop a classroom culture with learning at its center, assistance to reflect on their own beliefs as well as those in the education community, and to fend off the negative effect of externally imposed tests.
“The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture”
Lorrie A. Shepard examines the role of assessments and how they can be use as part of the teacher’s instruction to support and enhance learning. She has organized her article into three sections: 1) a historical framework; 2) social-constructivist conceptual framework; and 3) ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support social-constructivist the method and practice of teaching.
1. Shepard creates a set of three interlocking circles that demonstrates the central ideas of social efficiency and scientific management in curriculum were linked to hereditarian theories of intelligence and associationist/behaviorist learning theories.
o Social Efficiency- modern principles of scientific management could be applied to not only factories, but equally to schools; task analysis of skills to be taught; mastery of each skill; scientific measures to determine future role in life and appropriate curriculum or differentiated curriculum for the role, don’t teach what they will never use.
o Hereditarian Theory of IQ- IQ as innate and fixed;
Associationist and Behaviorist Learning Theories- Concept of mind is
replaced by stimulus-response (Skinnerism), learning occurs by an
accumulation of atomized bits of knowledge, learning is sequenced and
hierarchical, each objective must be explicitly taught, testing to ensure mastery
before moving on, tests correspond with learning, motivation is external and
based on positive reinforcement of many small steps.
o Scientific Measurement- tracking through IQ testing, objective tests to measure achievement. Shepard continues discussion about objective tests and how they were first developed test what was important to learn. To this day, this type of testing affects teachers’ beliefs about the nature of evidence and principles of fairness. Testing was separate from instruction and was uniformly administered. Formative testing or holistic evaluations were worrisome for teachers due to the subjectivity involved.
2. Shepard continues by discussing the principles of a ‘social-constructivist’ conceptual framework.
o Cognitive and Constructivist Learning Theories- Concept of mind is reintroduced and that learning is an active process of mental construction and sense making; prior knowledge and beliefs work to enable or impede new learning; intelligent thought and learning involves metacognition; expertise or a deep understanding is developed, not just an accumulation of information; cognitive abilities are developed through socially and culturally supported interactions.
o Reformed Vision of Curriculum- All students can learn; challenging content aimed at higher-order thinking and problem solving; equal opportunity for divers learners, genuine opportunities for high-quality instruction; classroom routines and the socialization between teachers and students should help students in the ways of thinking and speaking in academic disciplines; authentic learning and connected to the real world, foster development of dispositions, perseverance in trying to solve difficult problems.
o Classroom Assessment- Elicit higher-order thinking and problem solving; addresses learning processes as well as the learning outcomes; ongoing process that is integrated with instruction; used formatively; student understand expectations and are active in evaluating their own work; used to evaluate teaching as well as learning.
3. Shepard describes ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support social-constructivist the method and practice of teaching. Assessments need to be more open-ended so that students can apply their knowledge to real life situations. Assessments need to reflect metacognition development, dispositions, and the levels at which students have been socialized into the discourse and practices of content areas. Shepard lists several methods for gathering data: observations, clinical interviews, reflective journals, projects, demonstrations, portfolio work, and student’s self-evaluations. Teachers must use systematic analysis of the evidence.
• In Shepard’s next section, she describes the negative effects of standards-based reform but also the use of assessment for learning. The author proposes changes in classroom practices so that students can no longer fake their level of competency. Shepard discusses several specific assessment strategies that should be part of a more fundamental shift in classroom practices and learning expectations.
o Dynamic, Ongoing Assessment- should be moved to middle of the teaching and learning process to determine what student is able to do independently (Vygotsky) and allow the teacher to reshape their teaching process.
o Prior Knowledge- reexamining to take into account knowledge in social and cultural contexts and then using this information to first, shape instruction, and second, use as an activation technique (K-W-L).
o Feedback- when done correctly, leads to self-correction and learner improvement while maintaining motivation and self-confidence.
o Transfer- more likely if students have practiced with a variety of applications and new situations.
o Explicit Criteria- clear understanding of the criteria by which their work will be assessed. Features should be so ‘transparent’ that students can evaluate their own work at the same level that the teacher would have.
o Self-Assessment- increases collaboration between teacher and student, increases student responsibility and ownership.
o Evaluation of Teaching- using assessments, whether formal, informal, or on-going to adjust teaching while modeling to students why they are changing their lesson.
• In conclusion, Shepard states that teachers need to be able to ask the right questions at the right time, anticipate conceptual pitfalls, have a ready repertoire of tasks that will lead to a student’s deeper understanding of subject matter, learn to use assessment in new ways, need a theory of motivation, knowledge of how to develop a classroom culture with learning at its center, assistance to reflect on their own beliefs as well as those in the education community, and to fend off the negative effect of externally imposed tests.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Chapter 49
Chapter 49
“A New Framework for Understanding Cognition and Affect in Writing”
The author, John R. Hayes, presents a new framework of writing that will be useful for interpreting a wider range of writing activities, one that he hopes improves the 1980 Hayes-Flower model.
• In short, the 1980 model had tree major components: 1) task environment; external factors that influenced the writing task, 2) cognitive processes; planning, translating or text generation, and revision, 3) writer’s long-term memory; knowledge of topic, audience, and genre.
• The new model contains two major components, the Task Environment and the Individual.
The Task Environment: Social Environment and Physical Environment
The Social Environment:
• Audience: We write in accordance to our audience, whether they are friends or strangers. Culture itself, through past writers, shape our words, images and forms. Cultural differences influence writing, as does a writer’s immediate social surrounding.
• Collaborators: Collaborative writing in schools as a method of teaching writing skills. New research indicates that this type of experience can lead to improved individual writing performances. Within the workplace, many texts are produced by work groups. The output depends on both the makeup of the group itself and the skills of the individuals themselves.
The Physical Environment:
• The Text So Far: Writers reread to help shape or modify what they write next or have written. Writing modifies its own task environment.
• The Composing Medium: Studies indicate the ‘medium’ effects the writing processes such as planning and editing. Results indicated both pros and cons for pen/paper as compared to a word processor and that one medium is not better than the other, but that the medium does influence writing processes.
The Individual: Working Memory Motivation/Affect, Cognitive Processes, and Long-
Term Memory
Working Memory: Central importance in the writing activity
• Hayes draws heavily on Baddeley’s general model of working memory. Baddeley describes working memory as a limited resource that is used for storing information and carrying out cognitive processes. This memory consists of a central executive (tasks like mental arithmetic, logical reasoning, semantic verification, and controls functions like retrieving information from long-term memory and managing tasks not fully automated) together with two specialized memories plus an added memory by Hayes-
o Phonological loop- stores phonologically coded information, like an inner voice that continually repeats information to be retained (i.e., telephone numbers)
o Sketchpad- stores visually or spatially coded information
o Semantic memory- Hayes adds this to Baddeley’s model as useful in describing text generation
Motivation: Following Gestalt, Hayes writes of activity being goal directed and discusses four areas that are important for writing
• Goals- usually, activities are characterized as means-end analysis with a single dominant goal, however, in writing, writers have more than one goal and the text will be shaped by the writer’s need to achieve a balance among competing goals.
• Predispositions- an individual’s beliefs about writing, influence motivation. If students think that writing is a gift and fail, they may form anxiety and a negative disposition therefore, avoids writing activities.
• Beliefs and Attitudes- If there is difficulty, students tend to blame themselves. However, there is some research that indicates that the act of writing about stress-related topics can have important positive emotional consequences.
• Cost-Benefit Estimates- motivation can influence strategy selection and can be view as shaping the course of action by selecting an activity that is least costly or least likely to lead to error. Changes in the task environment can also have impacts on the costs.
Cognitive Processes:
• Text interpretation- internal representations from linguistic and graphic inputs from reading, listening, and scanning graphics.
• Reflection- internal representations to produce other internal representations through problem solving, decision making, and inferencing.
o Problem solving- putting together a series of steps to reach a goal. Student writers are often asked to do writing yet do not have a fully adequate task schema requiring them to rely on their general problem solving and decision making skills to complete the task.
o Decision making- evaluation of alternatives, writer uses gap-filling decisions in tasks that have ill- defined problems, especially when creating first drafts. During revisions, the writer must decide on adequacy based on a variety of dimensions (diction, tone, clarity, effect on audience).
o Inferencing- process in which new information s derived from old. Authors make inferences about the knowledge and interests of their audiences, readers may draw inferences that are idiosyncratic and consequential and is referred to as the phenomenon of ‘elaboration’.
• Text production- internal representations from context of the task environment and produces written, spoken, or graphic output. Sentence construction is considered. Experienced writers and language users have a reduction in the amount of memory required for constructing sentence parts from content and will write longer sentences.
“A New Framework for Understanding Cognition and Affect in Writing”
The author, John R. Hayes, presents a new framework of writing that will be useful for interpreting a wider range of writing activities, one that he hopes improves the 1980 Hayes-Flower model.
• In short, the 1980 model had tree major components: 1) task environment; external factors that influenced the writing task, 2) cognitive processes; planning, translating or text generation, and revision, 3) writer’s long-term memory; knowledge of topic, audience, and genre.
• The new model contains two major components, the Task Environment and the Individual.
The Task Environment: Social Environment and Physical Environment
The Social Environment:
• Audience: We write in accordance to our audience, whether they are friends or strangers. Culture itself, through past writers, shape our words, images and forms. Cultural differences influence writing, as does a writer’s immediate social surrounding.
• Collaborators: Collaborative writing in schools as a method of teaching writing skills. New research indicates that this type of experience can lead to improved individual writing performances. Within the workplace, many texts are produced by work groups. The output depends on both the makeup of the group itself and the skills of the individuals themselves.
The Physical Environment:
• The Text So Far: Writers reread to help shape or modify what they write next or have written. Writing modifies its own task environment.
• The Composing Medium: Studies indicate the ‘medium’ effects the writing processes such as planning and editing. Results indicated both pros and cons for pen/paper as compared to a word processor and that one medium is not better than the other, but that the medium does influence writing processes.
The Individual: Working Memory Motivation/Affect, Cognitive Processes, and Long-
Term Memory
Working Memory: Central importance in the writing activity
• Hayes draws heavily on Baddeley’s general model of working memory. Baddeley describes working memory as a limited resource that is used for storing information and carrying out cognitive processes. This memory consists of a central executive (tasks like mental arithmetic, logical reasoning, semantic verification, and controls functions like retrieving information from long-term memory and managing tasks not fully automated) together with two specialized memories plus an added memory by Hayes-
o Phonological loop- stores phonologically coded information, like an inner voice that continually repeats information to be retained (i.e., telephone numbers)
o Sketchpad- stores visually or spatially coded information
o Semantic memory- Hayes adds this to Baddeley’s model as useful in describing text generation
Motivation: Following Gestalt, Hayes writes of activity being goal directed and discusses four areas that are important for writing
• Goals- usually, activities are characterized as means-end analysis with a single dominant goal, however, in writing, writers have more than one goal and the text will be shaped by the writer’s need to achieve a balance among competing goals.
• Predispositions- an individual’s beliefs about writing, influence motivation. If students think that writing is a gift and fail, they may form anxiety and a negative disposition therefore, avoids writing activities.
• Beliefs and Attitudes- If there is difficulty, students tend to blame themselves. However, there is some research that indicates that the act of writing about stress-related topics can have important positive emotional consequences.
• Cost-Benefit Estimates- motivation can influence strategy selection and can be view as shaping the course of action by selecting an activity that is least costly or least likely to lead to error. Changes in the task environment can also have impacts on the costs.
Cognitive Processes:
• Text interpretation- internal representations from linguistic and graphic inputs from reading, listening, and scanning graphics.
• Reflection- internal representations to produce other internal representations through problem solving, decision making, and inferencing.
o Problem solving- putting together a series of steps to reach a goal. Student writers are often asked to do writing yet do not have a fully adequate task schema requiring them to rely on their general problem solving and decision making skills to complete the task.
o Decision making- evaluation of alternatives, writer uses gap-filling decisions in tasks that have ill- defined problems, especially when creating first drafts. During revisions, the writer must decide on adequacy based on a variety of dimensions (diction, tone, clarity, effect on audience).
o Inferencing- process in which new information s derived from old. Authors make inferences about the knowledge and interests of their audiences, readers may draw inferences that are idiosyncratic and consequential and is referred to as the phenomenon of ‘elaboration’.
• Text production- internal representations from context of the task environment and produces written, spoken, or graphic output. Sentence construction is considered. Experienced writers and language users have a reduction in the amount of memory required for constructing sentence parts from content and will write longer sentences.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Chapter 40
Chapter 40
“Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading, Revisited”
Over twenty years ago, S. Jay Samuels and D. LaBerge developed the model of automatic information processing for reading. Teachers and researchers used it for explanations of the concept of automaticity and the study provided the conceptual groundwork for repeated reading. Samuels revisits his theory of automaticity and attempts two things; describe theory and its practical applications; explain new ideas about automaticity.
• Samuels begins by describing the heart of his LaBerge-Samuels model- attention. There are two components to attention, internal (alertness, selectivity, limited capacity) and external (related to orientation of one’s sensory organs).
• Core component to model- internal attention:
o Alertness- active attempt to come in contact with sources of information
o Selectivity- sensory organs can be overwhelmed so we select what we will process at any given moment
o Limited capacity- skill of learning uses up attention and we pay attention to only one task at a time, the difference between an associative task that becomes automatic and a cognitive task.
• So how does it relate to reading?
• Internal components of attention essential for decoding skills
• Attention needed for comprehension; ability to get meaning for a word is not the same as comprehending the sentence. Attention is necessary to determine relationships/meanings.
• The dilemma- beginning readers must use attention to decode and if attention can be done one process at a time, how can they comprehend? Attention is therefore switched alternately from decoding to comprehension whereas fluent readers decode automatically and attention is on comprehension (i.e., like learning a second language, you have to translate first, then read for meaning).
• LaBerge-Samuels model thought of as bottom-up, Samuels describes it as top-down processing because the feedback loops from semantic memory to phonological memory to visual memory. He writes that for processing of a word through visual information on the page (bottom-up) as well as knowledge stored in semantic memory (top-down), the model must allow for an interaction of visual information and knowledge as the basis for word recognition.
o Visual memory- first stage of processing- information analyzed by letters/letter combinations and features of the word. When word codes as learned, attention is not required for processing. Samuels makes a distinction between accuracy and automatic. With practice, a student will reach automaticity both in accuracy and prosody.
o Phonological memory- comes from visual memory, episodic memory, feedback from semantic memory, articulatory responses, and direct external acoustic stimulation.
o Similarities between visual and phonological memory- visual moves from features to letters to spelling patterns to words, phonological moves from phonemes to syllables to words. Both may move from features up to words or from words down to features (top-down analysis from whole to parts or bottom-up analysis by synthesizing a word from its parts to a whole).
o Episodic memory- putting a time, place, and context tag on events and knowledge. Categorized under the ‘wh’ words- ‘when/time’, ‘where/place’, and ‘who/person’. This knowledge is stored in semantic memory while details surrounding the actual instruction remain in episodic memory and may be lost in time.
o Semantic memory and comprehension- individual word meanings are produced and comprehension of written messages occurs.
• Some ideas or solutions for reading problems:
o Attention on decoding and not comprehension- a) easier reading texts, b) rereading, c) practice
o Poor comprehension- a) explain that it may be due to lack of attention directed on processing the text, b) teach to engage in self-testing while reading.
“Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading, Revisited”
Over twenty years ago, S. Jay Samuels and D. LaBerge developed the model of automatic information processing for reading. Teachers and researchers used it for explanations of the concept of automaticity and the study provided the conceptual groundwork for repeated reading. Samuels revisits his theory of automaticity and attempts two things; describe theory and its practical applications; explain new ideas about automaticity.
• Samuels begins by describing the heart of his LaBerge-Samuels model- attention. There are two components to attention, internal (alertness, selectivity, limited capacity) and external (related to orientation of one’s sensory organs).
• Core component to model- internal attention:
o Alertness- active attempt to come in contact with sources of information
o Selectivity- sensory organs can be overwhelmed so we select what we will process at any given moment
o Limited capacity- skill of learning uses up attention and we pay attention to only one task at a time, the difference between an associative task that becomes automatic and a cognitive task.
• So how does it relate to reading?
• Internal components of attention essential for decoding skills
• Attention needed for comprehension; ability to get meaning for a word is not the same as comprehending the sentence. Attention is necessary to determine relationships/meanings.
• The dilemma- beginning readers must use attention to decode and if attention can be done one process at a time, how can they comprehend? Attention is therefore switched alternately from decoding to comprehension whereas fluent readers decode automatically and attention is on comprehension (i.e., like learning a second language, you have to translate first, then read for meaning).
• LaBerge-Samuels model thought of as bottom-up, Samuels describes it as top-down processing because the feedback loops from semantic memory to phonological memory to visual memory. He writes that for processing of a word through visual information on the page (bottom-up) as well as knowledge stored in semantic memory (top-down), the model must allow for an interaction of visual information and knowledge as the basis for word recognition.
o Visual memory- first stage of processing- information analyzed by letters/letter combinations and features of the word. When word codes as learned, attention is not required for processing. Samuels makes a distinction between accuracy and automatic. With practice, a student will reach automaticity both in accuracy and prosody.
o Phonological memory- comes from visual memory, episodic memory, feedback from semantic memory, articulatory responses, and direct external acoustic stimulation.
o Similarities between visual and phonological memory- visual moves from features to letters to spelling patterns to words, phonological moves from phonemes to syllables to words. Both may move from features up to words or from words down to features (top-down analysis from whole to parts or bottom-up analysis by synthesizing a word from its parts to a whole).
o Episodic memory- putting a time, place, and context tag on events and knowledge. Categorized under the ‘wh’ words- ‘when/time’, ‘where/place’, and ‘who/person’. This knowledge is stored in semantic memory while details surrounding the actual instruction remain in episodic memory and may be lost in time.
o Semantic memory and comprehension- individual word meanings are produced and comprehension of written messages occurs.
• Some ideas or solutions for reading problems:
o Attention on decoding and not comprehension- a) easier reading texts, b) rereading, c) practice
o Poor comprehension- a) explain that it may be due to lack of attention directed on processing the text, b) teach to engage in self-testing while reading.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Chapter 34: Motivational and Cognitive Proedictors of Text Comprehension and Reading Amount
The article, “Motivational and Cognitive Predictors of Text Comprehension and Reading Amount” by John T. Guthrie, Allan Wigfield, Jamie L. Metsala, and Kathleen E. Cox, discusses the correlation between reading amount and text comprehension. In the past reading researchers and psychologists attempted to predict significant variables such as word recognition or text comprehension from important underlying processes, which were generally cognitive. This article extends this earlier work by examining how motivational and reading amount variables, in addition to cognitive processes, add to the prediction of students’ text comprehension. Through combing motivational and cognitive constructs, the researchers hope to understand more fully text comprehension.
Definitions in this article:
· Text Comprehension- the capacity of the learner to construct new knowledge or information from written text (Anderson & Pearson, 1984).
o Two major cognitive predictors:
1. Past achievement
2. Prior Knowledge (Schema)
· Reading Amount- the frequency and time spent reading a range of topics for various purposes.
· Motivation- relation to characteristics of individuals, such as their goals, competence-related beliefs, and needs that influence their achievement and activities
· Goal- purposes individuals have for doing different activities.
o Two broad goal orientations:
1. Performance Goal- focus is on demonstrating that one is capable and can outperform others.
2. Mastery Orientation- attempts to improve one’s capabilities and focusing on the task one is doing.
· Intrinsic Motivation- curiosity and interest in an activity one is doing and striving for a mastery orientation toward tasks
· Extrinsic motivation- effort directed toward towards obtaining external recognition, rewards, or incentives in learning and reading
· Self-efficacy- people’s judgments of their ability to organize and execute courses of action required to reach designated types of performances”
Based on the amount children read, the measurement of text comprehension is possible. As noted in this report, text comprehension in grade 5 was predicted by reading amount (based on time spent reading out of school from diaries), after accounting for prior text comprehension in grade 2. Additionally, text comprehension from grade 5 to grade 10 was significantly correlated with reading amount, according to a composite of print exposure measured at grade 11. These finding are emphasized by out-of-school reading for enjoyment, although in-school reading also plays a role in text comprehension. For example, Elley (1992) ascertains that teacher reported frequency of silent reading in class was greatly associated with text comprehension.
There are numerous reports on motivation. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation plays an important role. Intrinsic motivation is associated with how a person feels, the better they feel about their reading ability, and the more intrinsically motivated they are to read. While some students have extrinsic motivation for reading, it is clear that many students are motivated to read for both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. In this study, curiosity, performance goals, and extrinsic motivation were included to broaden the knowledge domain to include the reader’s goals in addition to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In short, the more motivated a student to read, the higher the reading amount.
Self-efficacy also plays an important role in reading motivation. For example, in a range of reading studies, Schunk and Zimmerman (1997) noted that students with high self-efficacy see difficult reading tasks as challenging and work diligently to master them, using their cognitive strategies productively. Students’ success, according to Schunk and Zimmerman, was due to self-efficacy within a reading task and is associated with the use of strategies, self-regulation, and text comprehension within the tasks. If a student feels they can execute the desired task, they are more likely to try to achieve it.
To demonstrate how this all works, the results of two studies are included. In Study 1, a local sample of third and fifth graders was used since other research had previously used the same groups. In addition to using the same groups, these grades also spanned an important period in terms of the developing relations between motivation and achievement. Study 2, consisted of a national sample of students in grades 8 and 10. Since these age groups had not often been included in research on reading motivation, they were included, even though in general motivation literature it has been shown that motivation and achievement in these age groups relate to each other.
The primary interests of conducting the research were:
· To see how children’s text comprehension was predicted by their reading amount and reading motivation and
· To see how children’s reading amount was predicted by their reading motivation.
The study is organized around these three questions:
1. To what extent are passage comprehension and conceptual learning from multiple texts predicted by reading amount when accounting for the contributions of past achievement, prior knowledge, reading motivation, and reading efficacy to text comprehension?
2. To what extent is reading amount predicted by reading motivation when accounting for the contributions of past achievement, prior knowledge, and reading efficacy to reading amount?
3. To what extent is reading amount predicted by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation when analyzed separately and controlling the contributions of each for past reading achievement, prior knowledge, and self-efficacy?
The participants in both studies are as follows:
Study 1:
Three schools bordering a large mid-Atlantic metropolis.
Each school- multicultural population consisting of approx. 55% African American, 22% Caucasian, 15% Hispanic, and 7% Asian or other
Total of 271 students- 117 fifth graders, 154 third graders, 47% boys, 53% girls
Two schools had Chapter 1 designation
These two grades were frequently used in prior research and were of interest to practitioners due to accountability at these levels
Total of 10 teachers- age range between 41-50, with 20 to 24 years of teaching experience, and all had bachelor’s degrees plus 45 hours of university credit.
Study 2:
Drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88) database.
Selected all grade 10 students who were included as eighth graders in the base-year sample
Total of 17,424 students representing national sample (see Owings et al., 1994).
Results
The results of the two studies confirmed that indeed, text comprehension is predicted by reading amount. This was done by showing the effects of reading amount on text comprehension by using a variety of measures of reading amount. These measures included print exposure, diaries kept by children, and self-reporting questionnaires. In Study 1, it was found that reading amount predicts text comprehension even when controlling the underlying variables. However, in Study 2, reading motivation was the predictor for text comprehension. This shows that reading motivation is a predictor of reading amount.
Since I am a Title 1 reading teacher, this report has relevance for me as I find myself being a cheerleader for some of my students. I am always trying to find ways to help my students become more engaged in reading. I feel it begins with seeing the relevance in learning the skills associated with reading. For example, a second grade student I had a few years ago thought he could only read when he was with me. We work on his reading skills and eventually after feeling success in small groups, read a few short stories to his class. After reading to his class, he was gleaming from ear to ear. From that day on, he has been more motivated to read and thus this day is reading a larger amount than he had been. Success like this helps me to see the correlation between reading motivation and reading amount. In addition, because of a greater reading amount, his text comprehension has also increased.
Definitions in this article:
· Text Comprehension- the capacity of the learner to construct new knowledge or information from written text (Anderson & Pearson, 1984).
o Two major cognitive predictors:
1. Past achievement
2. Prior Knowledge (Schema)
· Reading Amount- the frequency and time spent reading a range of topics for various purposes.
· Motivation- relation to characteristics of individuals, such as their goals, competence-related beliefs, and needs that influence their achievement and activities
· Goal- purposes individuals have for doing different activities.
o Two broad goal orientations:
1. Performance Goal- focus is on demonstrating that one is capable and can outperform others.
2. Mastery Orientation- attempts to improve one’s capabilities and focusing on the task one is doing.
· Intrinsic Motivation- curiosity and interest in an activity one is doing and striving for a mastery orientation toward tasks
· Extrinsic motivation- effort directed toward towards obtaining external recognition, rewards, or incentives in learning and reading
· Self-efficacy- people’s judgments of their ability to organize and execute courses of action required to reach designated types of performances”
Based on the amount children read, the measurement of text comprehension is possible. As noted in this report, text comprehension in grade 5 was predicted by reading amount (based on time spent reading out of school from diaries), after accounting for prior text comprehension in grade 2. Additionally, text comprehension from grade 5 to grade 10 was significantly correlated with reading amount, according to a composite of print exposure measured at grade 11. These finding are emphasized by out-of-school reading for enjoyment, although in-school reading also plays a role in text comprehension. For example, Elley (1992) ascertains that teacher reported frequency of silent reading in class was greatly associated with text comprehension.
There are numerous reports on motivation. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation plays an important role. Intrinsic motivation is associated with how a person feels, the better they feel about their reading ability, and the more intrinsically motivated they are to read. While some students have extrinsic motivation for reading, it is clear that many students are motivated to read for both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. In this study, curiosity, performance goals, and extrinsic motivation were included to broaden the knowledge domain to include the reader’s goals in addition to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In short, the more motivated a student to read, the higher the reading amount.
Self-efficacy also plays an important role in reading motivation. For example, in a range of reading studies, Schunk and Zimmerman (1997) noted that students with high self-efficacy see difficult reading tasks as challenging and work diligently to master them, using their cognitive strategies productively. Students’ success, according to Schunk and Zimmerman, was due to self-efficacy within a reading task and is associated with the use of strategies, self-regulation, and text comprehension within the tasks. If a student feels they can execute the desired task, they are more likely to try to achieve it.
To demonstrate how this all works, the results of two studies are included. In Study 1, a local sample of third and fifth graders was used since other research had previously used the same groups. In addition to using the same groups, these grades also spanned an important period in terms of the developing relations between motivation and achievement. Study 2, consisted of a national sample of students in grades 8 and 10. Since these age groups had not often been included in research on reading motivation, they were included, even though in general motivation literature it has been shown that motivation and achievement in these age groups relate to each other.
The primary interests of conducting the research were:
· To see how children’s text comprehension was predicted by their reading amount and reading motivation and
· To see how children’s reading amount was predicted by their reading motivation.
The study is organized around these three questions:
1. To what extent are passage comprehension and conceptual learning from multiple texts predicted by reading amount when accounting for the contributions of past achievement, prior knowledge, reading motivation, and reading efficacy to text comprehension?
2. To what extent is reading amount predicted by reading motivation when accounting for the contributions of past achievement, prior knowledge, and reading efficacy to reading amount?
3. To what extent is reading amount predicted by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation when analyzed separately and controlling the contributions of each for past reading achievement, prior knowledge, and self-efficacy?
The participants in both studies are as follows:
Study 1:
Three schools bordering a large mid-Atlantic metropolis.
Each school- multicultural population consisting of approx. 55% African American, 22% Caucasian, 15% Hispanic, and 7% Asian or other
Total of 271 students- 117 fifth graders, 154 third graders, 47% boys, 53% girls
Two schools had Chapter 1 designation
These two grades were frequently used in prior research and were of interest to practitioners due to accountability at these levels
Total of 10 teachers- age range between 41-50, with 20 to 24 years of teaching experience, and all had bachelor’s degrees plus 45 hours of university credit.
Study 2:
Drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88) database.
Selected all grade 10 students who were included as eighth graders in the base-year sample
Total of 17,424 students representing national sample (see Owings et al., 1994).
Results
The results of the two studies confirmed that indeed, text comprehension is predicted by reading amount. This was done by showing the effects of reading amount on text comprehension by using a variety of measures of reading amount. These measures included print exposure, diaries kept by children, and self-reporting questionnaires. In Study 1, it was found that reading amount predicts text comprehension even when controlling the underlying variables. However, in Study 2, reading motivation was the predictor for text comprehension. This shows that reading motivation is a predictor of reading amount.
Since I am a Title 1 reading teacher, this report has relevance for me as I find myself being a cheerleader for some of my students. I am always trying to find ways to help my students become more engaged in reading. I feel it begins with seeing the relevance in learning the skills associated with reading. For example, a second grade student I had a few years ago thought he could only read when he was with me. We work on his reading skills and eventually after feeling success in small groups, read a few short stories to his class. After reading to his class, he was gleaming from ear to ear. From that day on, he has been more motivated to read and thus this day is reading a larger amount than he had been. Success like this helps me to see the correlation between reading motivation and reading amount. In addition, because of a greater reading amount, his text comprehension has also increased.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Chapter 35 The Role of Responsive Teaching in Focusing Reader Intention and Developing Reader Motivation
Submitted by Debbie Shanks
Robert B. Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau explore the characteristics that influential teachers share when providing motivating literacy lessons to their students. This article looks at Ms. Hawthorne, a new teacher, and her enthusiastic exploration into a better literacy program for her new students. It also looks to the role of the student as an active participant in the literacy process. Through this exploration of both the teacher and student, the authors explore several factors that add to reader and teacher motivation. Ruddell and Unrau then list ways teachers can assist with reader intention and motivation. The authors then point to twelve guidelines for designing Literacy-enhancing instructional environments. Ruddell and Unrau complete the article with a list of nine critically important phenomenons that they feel need to be included in further reading development and literacy studies.
Teachers need to develop reader intention and motivation by providing:
Developing of self:
*Identity and self-schema-when a person has a sense of who they are, a sense of their past, present, and future.
*Sense of self-efficacy and self-worth-what a person believes themselves capable of doing and learning.
*Expectations-influences focus of intention
*Experiential self- controls the focus or attention; works parallel to and simultaneously with the other features, but less consciously and less rationally; processes imagery, narratives and metaphors to give a sense of our experience’s meaning; loose associations among images, stories and analogies.
*Self-knowledge-all that the person knows of his or her own self-system, instructional orientation and task-engagement resources.
*Instructional orientation:
*Achievement goals-the engagement of the learner in selecting, structuring and making sense of achievement experience.
*Task values-attainment value (the importance an individual attributes to a task), intrinsic-interest value (the task’s subjective interest to an individual), utility value (the usefulness of a task in light of a person’s future goals) and the cost of success (the “disadvantages” of accomplishing a task, such as experiencing anxiety).
*Sociocultural values and beliefs-values and beliefs effect the interpretation of texts, relationships with students, and instructional decision making. Breakdowns can occur when sociocultural values and beliefs do not match either the teacher or the student.
*Stance-the perspective and orientation that a reader adopts toward the reading of a particular text; attitude.
*Task-engagement resources-the cognitive tools which include:
*Reader Text-processing Resources:
*Knowledge of language
*Word analysis
*Text-processing strategies
*Metacognitive strategies
*Knowledge of classroom and social interaction
*World knowledge
*Teacher Instructional Design Resources:
*Knowledge of students and their meaning-construction process
*Knowledge of literature and content areas
*Teaching strategies
*World knowledge
*Metacognitive knowledge
Guidelines for Designing Literacy-Enhancing Instructional Environments
*The teacher must allow the student to shape their understanding of the text provided in their own self-schema as well as implement activities that present opportunity for student reflection and self-discovery.
*The teacher must provide the opportunities to build a student’s self-worth.
*The teacher must provide a classroom climate that stresses students working towards task-orientated goals that enhance a sense of mastery and competency.
*The teacher must develop a classroom environment where student’s acquisition of knowledge, skills and strategies is incremental and moves toward independence and self-regulation.
*The teacher must activate and extend students’ background knowledge to assist with the construction of meaning.
*The teacher must model reflectively and metacognitive processes for students.
*The teacher must design tasks that involve real-life situations that are seen by the students’ as being useful outside of the classroom setting or for their future.
*The teacher must provide clear literacy expectations that are designed for each individual student’s abilities and give the support for achieving the abilities to the student’s greatest potential.
*The teacher must be flexible, look at things from multiple perspectives and provide instructional attitudes that promote literacy engagement.
*The teacher must find and use individual students’ sociocultural values and beliefs as resources for providing a classroom environment that reflects the students orientations while also developing an understanding of and tolerance for alternative values and belief systems; a safe environment.
*The teacher must allow for students to have a sense of ownership when reading text. Students must also share in the authority in the interpretation of texts and the criteria for validation of those interpretations.
*The teacher must formulate or select tasks that are suitable to students’ task-engagement resources and that also allows the students to internalize knowledge and skills to become increasingly independent, self-regulating, and self-reliant learners.
Nine critically important phenomenons that warrants further research:
1. How are influential teachers formed? Should teacher preparation programs include essential information to future teachers on how to provide relevant literacy instruction?
2. Which of the factors critical to developing reader and teacher focus of intention is the most effective and lasting motivators and how they interact?
3. How can literacy teachers effectively model, transfer to students and sustain belief in a mastery-goal orientation and the incremental benefits of effortful learning?
4. How could researchers promote literacy engagement from the early years of schooling and also what kind of instruction is needed to foster metacognitition and comprehension?
5. What kinds of student-teacher interactions can take place to encourage a constant motivation for students to continue reading?
6. What type of text and tasks supports a student’s engagement in meaning of what is read?
7. How does a teacher’s exposure to past teaching practices affect their current practice, classroom environments and lessons?
8. How does a teacher’s instructional attitude affect lesson planning, reader intent, and student motivation to read?What effects do a teacher’s need for authority and its role in classroom have on readers’ comprehensio
Robert B. Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau explore the characteristics that influential teachers share when providing motivating literacy lessons to their students. This article looks at Ms. Hawthorne, a new teacher, and her enthusiastic exploration into a better literacy program for her new students. It also looks to the role of the student as an active participant in the literacy process. Through this exploration of both the teacher and student, the authors explore several factors that add to reader and teacher motivation. Ruddell and Unrau then list ways teachers can assist with reader intention and motivation. The authors then point to twelve guidelines for designing Literacy-enhancing instructional environments. Ruddell and Unrau complete the article with a list of nine critically important phenomenons that they feel need to be included in further reading development and literacy studies.
Teachers need to develop reader intention and motivation by providing:
Developing of self:
*Identity and self-schema-when a person has a sense of who they are, a sense of their past, present, and future.
*Sense of self-efficacy and self-worth-what a person believes themselves capable of doing and learning.
*Expectations-influences focus of intention
*Experiential self- controls the focus or attention; works parallel to and simultaneously with the other features, but less consciously and less rationally; processes imagery, narratives and metaphors to give a sense of our experience’s meaning; loose associations among images, stories and analogies.
*Self-knowledge-all that the person knows of his or her own self-system, instructional orientation and task-engagement resources.
*Instructional orientation:
*Achievement goals-the engagement of the learner in selecting, structuring and making sense of achievement experience.
*Task values-attainment value (the importance an individual attributes to a task), intrinsic-interest value (the task’s subjective interest to an individual), utility value (the usefulness of a task in light of a person’s future goals) and the cost of success (the “disadvantages” of accomplishing a task, such as experiencing anxiety).
*Sociocultural values and beliefs-values and beliefs effect the interpretation of texts, relationships with students, and instructional decision making. Breakdowns can occur when sociocultural values and beliefs do not match either the teacher or the student.
*Stance-the perspective and orientation that a reader adopts toward the reading of a particular text; attitude.
*Task-engagement resources-the cognitive tools which include:
*Reader Text-processing Resources:
*Knowledge of language
*Word analysis
*Text-processing strategies
*Metacognitive strategies
*Knowledge of classroom and social interaction
*World knowledge
*Teacher Instructional Design Resources:
*Knowledge of students and their meaning-construction process
*Knowledge of literature and content areas
*Teaching strategies
*World knowledge
*Metacognitive knowledge
Guidelines for Designing Literacy-Enhancing Instructional Environments
*The teacher must allow the student to shape their understanding of the text provided in their own self-schema as well as implement activities that present opportunity for student reflection and self-discovery.
*The teacher must provide the opportunities to build a student’s self-worth.
*The teacher must provide a classroom climate that stresses students working towards task-orientated goals that enhance a sense of mastery and competency.
*The teacher must develop a classroom environment where student’s acquisition of knowledge, skills and strategies is incremental and moves toward independence and self-regulation.
*The teacher must activate and extend students’ background knowledge to assist with the construction of meaning.
*The teacher must model reflectively and metacognitive processes for students.
*The teacher must design tasks that involve real-life situations that are seen by the students’ as being useful outside of the classroom setting or for their future.
*The teacher must provide clear literacy expectations that are designed for each individual student’s abilities and give the support for achieving the abilities to the student’s greatest potential.
*The teacher must be flexible, look at things from multiple perspectives and provide instructional attitudes that promote literacy engagement.
*The teacher must find and use individual students’ sociocultural values and beliefs as resources for providing a classroom environment that reflects the students orientations while also developing an understanding of and tolerance for alternative values and belief systems; a safe environment.
*The teacher must allow for students to have a sense of ownership when reading text. Students must also share in the authority in the interpretation of texts and the criteria for validation of those interpretations.
*The teacher must formulate or select tasks that are suitable to students’ task-engagement resources and that also allows the students to internalize knowledge and skills to become increasingly independent, self-regulating, and self-reliant learners.
Nine critically important phenomenons that warrants further research:
1. How are influential teachers formed? Should teacher preparation programs include essential information to future teachers on how to provide relevant literacy instruction?
2. Which of the factors critical to developing reader and teacher focus of intention is the most effective and lasting motivators and how they interact?
3. How can literacy teachers effectively model, transfer to students and sustain belief in a mastery-goal orientation and the incremental benefits of effortful learning?
4. How could researchers promote literacy engagement from the early years of schooling and also what kind of instruction is needed to foster metacognitition and comprehension?
5. What kinds of student-teacher interactions can take place to encourage a constant motivation for students to continue reading?
6. What type of text and tasks supports a student’s engagement in meaning of what is read?
7. How does a teacher’s exposure to past teaching practices affect their current practice, classroom environments and lessons?
8. How does a teacher’s instructional attitude affect lesson planning, reader intent, and student motivation to read?What effects do a teacher’s need for authority and its role in classroom have on readers’ comprehensio
To Err is Human: Learning Language Processes by Analyzing Miscues
By Yetta M. Goodman and Kenneth S. Goodman
Susan Conklin for
Michael’s Class and the relaxation of the need to be perfect
Goodman and Goodman recognize that people are not perfect. In looking at the power of language, they highlight our use of language fills in the gaps of missing elements in the construction of knowledge. Language allows us to infer unstated meanings, underlying structures, deal with novel experiences, novel thoughts, and novel emotions in order to predict, guess, make choices, take risks, go beyond observable data.
Their assumption is that everything that happens during reading is caused and that unexpected responses come from the same place as expected responses. Reading aloud involves continuous oral response by the reader as meaning is constructed. This reveals the readers’ process and underlying competence.
Effective analysis of the miscues includes text long enough to generate a sufficient number of miscues. The text must be challenging and if readers hesitate for more than 30 seconds, they are urged to guess and if hesitation persists, they are told to keep reading even if they miss a word or phrase.
Readers receive more than one reading task and different text structures. Research applies to more than one language. Examples are included in this article of the text and of the miscued transcript. An assessment revealed differences between reasonable miscues for meaning and grammar hence semantically acceptable miscues reveal approaches toward comprehension marked by cognitive effort in the face of confusion.
Miscue has meaning. Analysis of miscues lets us know what the reader comprehends and what they are not. The reader’s ability to predict and confirm their predictions with the use of strategies is evident. Are the predictions logical? Does the reader self-correct? How does the reader use pronouns? Why did the reader make this particular miscue?
Researchers examined retellings as a way of understanding miscues and their relationship to comprehension. They noted concept conception as relevant to gain insight into how concepts are developed and applied during the reading process.
The linguistic and conceptual schema reveals how the reader builds control of language and what he/she brings to the task. Mistakes in retelling are conceptually based and not mere confusions. What are the relationships of the elements and how does the reader use concepts in the active process of reading comprehension.
The use of intonation in reading reveals understanding of morphemes and their grammatical use even if the reader pronounces a nonsense word during reading aloud. If syntactic sense is maintained then cohesion and coherence dominates the comprehension experience.
The Goodmans state the significance of miscuing impacts our understanding of what the reader understands, and we must consider the interrelationship of the miscues and the cues on target to know what the reader has cognitively achieved.
Developmentally, children invent schema while writing language. In schema we can see the structure of related knowledge, ideas, emotions, and actions that have been internalized. We can examine the questions a reader develops from various kinds of schema as linguistic or conceptual. Overarching schemata reveals and a new schema modifies old schemata. (This is what we are doing during our graduate study so that our comprehension of effective ways to execute our educator role with students sheds ineffective ways and the students receive a substantially better education.)
Finally, schema-driven miscues is one that results from using existing schema to comprehend. Editing one’s schema through the process of learning would eventually eliminate at least those particular miscues related to old ways of thinking.
By Yetta M. Goodman and Kenneth S. Goodman
Susan Conklin for
Michael’s Class and the relaxation of the need to be perfect
Goodman and Goodman recognize that people are not perfect. In looking at the power of language, they highlight our use of language fills in the gaps of missing elements in the construction of knowledge. Language allows us to infer unstated meanings, underlying structures, deal with novel experiences, novel thoughts, and novel emotions in order to predict, guess, make choices, take risks, go beyond observable data.
Their assumption is that everything that happens during reading is caused and that unexpected responses come from the same place as expected responses. Reading aloud involves continuous oral response by the reader as meaning is constructed. This reveals the readers’ process and underlying competence.
Effective analysis of the miscues includes text long enough to generate a sufficient number of miscues. The text must be challenging and if readers hesitate for more than 30 seconds, they are urged to guess and if hesitation persists, they are told to keep reading even if they miss a word or phrase.
Readers receive more than one reading task and different text structures. Research applies to more than one language. Examples are included in this article of the text and of the miscued transcript. An assessment revealed differences between reasonable miscues for meaning and grammar hence semantically acceptable miscues reveal approaches toward comprehension marked by cognitive effort in the face of confusion.
Miscue has meaning. Analysis of miscues lets us know what the reader comprehends and what they are not. The reader’s ability to predict and confirm their predictions with the use of strategies is evident. Are the predictions logical? Does the reader self-correct? How does the reader use pronouns? Why did the reader make this particular miscue?
Researchers examined retellings as a way of understanding miscues and their relationship to comprehension. They noted concept conception as relevant to gain insight into how concepts are developed and applied during the reading process.
The linguistic and conceptual schema reveals how the reader builds control of language and what he/she brings to the task. Mistakes in retelling are conceptually based and not mere confusions. What are the relationships of the elements and how does the reader use concepts in the active process of reading comprehension.
The use of intonation in reading reveals understanding of morphemes and their grammatical use even if the reader pronounces a nonsense word during reading aloud. If syntactic sense is maintained then cohesion and coherence dominates the comprehension experience.
The Goodmans state the significance of miscuing impacts our understanding of what the reader understands, and we must consider the interrelationship of the miscues and the cues on target to know what the reader has cognitively achieved.
Developmentally, children invent schema while writing language. In schema we can see the structure of related knowledge, ideas, emotions, and actions that have been internalized. We can examine the questions a reader develops from various kinds of schema as linguistic or conceptual. Overarching schemata reveals and a new schema modifies old schemata. (This is what we are doing during our graduate study so that our comprehension of effective ways to execute our educator role with students sheds ineffective ways and the students receive a substantially better education.)
Finally, schema-driven miscues is one that results from using existing schema to comprehend. Editing one’s schema through the process of learning would eventually eliminate at least those particular miscues related to old ways of thinking.
Chapter 21
Chapter 21
Summary: Schema Activation and Schema Acquisition: Comment on Richard C. Anderson’s Remarks by John D. Bransford
Susan Conklin
For Michael Cameron’s Class
And higher learning
Bransford considered the processes of understanding and remembering of statements through schemata as the basis for interpreting and elaboration on the information received. Bransford highlights examples of Anderson’s explanations. He uses his own schemata and words for determining importance of data of the six functions.
1. Assimilating text information,
2. Making inferential elaborations that fill gaps in messages,
3. Allocating attention to important text elements,
4. Searching memory in an orderly fashion,
5. Formulating a summary of information,
6. Inferring and reconstructing the original message.
He discusses that background knowledge and experience for students may vary. One example is that many students may have been to airports but have different knowledge about the elements of airport. Without comprehensive knowledge, students may have inadequate schemata. His specific example includes metal detectors and their concept if a student has not had firsthand experience. He suggests that teachers should do more than just talking about metal detector when the goal is to have the student develop a more sophisticated schema. Bransford does not want the teacher to merely activate schema that already exists but to utilize and elaborate knowledge for a more developed schemata.
There may be terms that are familiar to persons (like vein and artery) but the person want to learn more about them. Definitions, facts, and the relationship of facts to each other build sophistication. If the facts seem arbitrary, they will be difficult to remember. However, if the learner can clarify fact significance, then learning is interesting and memorable.
Importantly, Bransford states the importance of precise elaborations because imprecise elaborations are worse for the student than no elaborations at all. Schema activation and schema construction represent two different problems. Simplification of text can omit information that is important for understanding of the concepts. The point is that the core concepts must remain intact if we are to have perspicacious students.
In conclusion, it is helpful to design education for precise analysis using the six functions and monitoring the interpretation of text by both teacher and student for sophisticated understanding and schema development noting that schema activation and schema development are two different processes and require different attention by the teacher. Children must learn to identify situations and learn to supply their own elaborations. This includes different text structures so that they may have available to them different schema when encountering new information. Additionally, note that different people have a different affinity for the comprehension of different text. Students should be aware of their activities, have learning material to experience the effects of their own learning and be able to modify their activities, evaluate materials, experience the effects on memory, and learn what to do to make the materials significant and relevant. These procedures for classroom and text learning may be different that approaches for students to learn independently.
Summary: Schema Activation and Schema Acquisition: Comment on Richard C. Anderson’s Remarks by John D. Bransford
Susan Conklin
For Michael Cameron’s Class
And higher learning
Bransford considered the processes of understanding and remembering of statements through schemata as the basis for interpreting and elaboration on the information received. Bransford highlights examples of Anderson’s explanations. He uses his own schemata and words for determining importance of data of the six functions.
1. Assimilating text information,
2. Making inferential elaborations that fill gaps in messages,
3. Allocating attention to important text elements,
4. Searching memory in an orderly fashion,
5. Formulating a summary of information,
6. Inferring and reconstructing the original message.
He discusses that background knowledge and experience for students may vary. One example is that many students may have been to airports but have different knowledge about the elements of airport. Without comprehensive knowledge, students may have inadequate schemata. His specific example includes metal detectors and their concept if a student has not had firsthand experience. He suggests that teachers should do more than just talking about metal detector when the goal is to have the student develop a more sophisticated schema. Bransford does not want the teacher to merely activate schema that already exists but to utilize and elaborate knowledge for a more developed schemata.
There may be terms that are familiar to persons (like vein and artery) but the person want to learn more about them. Definitions, facts, and the relationship of facts to each other build sophistication. If the facts seem arbitrary, they will be difficult to remember. However, if the learner can clarify fact significance, then learning is interesting and memorable.
Importantly, Bransford states the importance of precise elaborations because imprecise elaborations are worse for the student than no elaborations at all. Schema activation and schema construction represent two different problems. Simplification of text can omit information that is important for understanding of the concepts. The point is that the core concepts must remain intact if we are to have perspicacious students.
In conclusion, it is helpful to design education for precise analysis using the six functions and monitoring the interpretation of text by both teacher and student for sophisticated understanding and schema development noting that schema activation and schema development are two different processes and require different attention by the teacher. Children must learn to identify situations and learn to supply their own elaborations. This includes different text structures so that they may have available to them different schema when encountering new information. Additionally, note that different people have a different affinity for the comprehension of different text. Students should be aware of their activities, have learning material to experience the effects of their own learning and be able to modify their activities, evaluate materials, experience the effects on memory, and learn what to do to make the materials significant and relevant. These procedures for classroom and text learning may be different that approaches for students to learn independently.
Chaper 20
Chapter 20
Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory by Richard C. Anderson
Susan Conklin
For Michael’s Class
Fall 2007
Anderson’s attempt is to define reader’s schema and its role in comprehension, learning and remembering when confronted with text. Listeners’ schema awakens during the “cutting and fitting” process to understand the message. If one has knowledge about any topic and new information or problems introduced, the interpretation is complete and consistent. The reader captures not only the words but also their intended meaning. A reader with little or no knowledge on neither the topic nor effective understanding of the language, particularly Tier 3 vocabulary, that person will be confused however without a schema to meet the incoming information and a protocol for using that information. What is critical is a schema to understand the relationship of the elements in any particular communication. Additionally, more than one interpretation of text is possible depending on the reader’s culture. The brief example in this reading did not identify the situation. The text refers to a hold and considering escape. Subsequently, the reader learns that the passage refers to wrestling though a reader might project the schema of prison onto the text.
The thesis of this article is that comprehension is a matter of either building or activating a schema facilitating a coherent understanding of objects and events to form meaning of sentences and paragraphs to understand the whole message. A schema provides ideational scaffolding to support the listener in assimilating information. Metaphorically, schema provides a slot for the main entrée of information or parallel CSI information for solving mysteries. If the reader has a schema, the information enters into memory and other cognitive processes with relative ease and speed. Schema provides a way of allocating attention paid to information and selecting what are important aspects in the text. Additionally schema enables and allows:
Inferential elaboration: go beyond the text for what is not clear
Orderly memory searches: what was the appetizer? Soup? Etc.
Editing and summarizing: reader produces significant summaries
Inferential reconstruction: generate hypothesis about missing info
To be fair, a student must have schema created and must develop all of the above functions of schema in order to make sense of text. (This reminds me that a graduate student venturing to study content and evidence-based curriculum of a profession not previously studied finds initial contact with Tier 3 vocabulary extremely challenging. No doubt, this is the basis for a new reality TV series focusing on cognition survival.)
The awareness of the role of schema theory on comprehension would help the teacher differentiate between the students who cannot understand because of compromised cognitive abilities from the one who is merely lacking necessary schema. Similarly, culturally sensitive topics offer varying interpretations and an educator who is aware of these alternatives can listen with a multidimensional inner ear. Additionally, emotional responses to content can vary if material is offensive or insensitive to the state of being of the reader.
This article cited two food passages (one from a supermarket and one from a restaurant). Recall from the restaurant menu text was greater than for the supermarket items precisely because it matters more what one orders from a menu than what one throws into a supermarket cart. Hence, the amount of engagement with the text matters.
When readers were assigned roles during the reading of text, they learned more, e.g. pretending an identity before reading a text framed the breadth and depth of information accessed. Then when switching roles, learners continued to hold information from the first role yet learned the information in depth from the second role as well.
Relevant knowledge activated before learning builds schema for approaching text and promotes comprehension. Additionally, prediction techniques, such as Directed Reading-Thinking Activity causes readers to search their stored knowledge developing prediction. This group recalled 72% of the sentences in a study by Anderson, Mason, and Shirey (1984) while others’ recall was a mere 43%.
The author urges publishers to employ devices that highlight the structure of text material, provide advance organizers or structured overviews to facilitate comprehension. Additionally, be alert to culturally different schemata of students who are not part of the mainstream culture. However, the author feels that it is safe to assume the children from various subcultures will ascribe the same goals and motives to characters and imagine the same sequence of actions, predict the same emotional reactions or expect the same outcomes.
Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory by Richard C. Anderson
Susan Conklin
For Michael’s Class
Fall 2007
Anderson’s attempt is to define reader’s schema and its role in comprehension, learning and remembering when confronted with text. Listeners’ schema awakens during the “cutting and fitting” process to understand the message. If one has knowledge about any topic and new information or problems introduced, the interpretation is complete and consistent. The reader captures not only the words but also their intended meaning. A reader with little or no knowledge on neither the topic nor effective understanding of the language, particularly Tier 3 vocabulary, that person will be confused however without a schema to meet the incoming information and a protocol for using that information. What is critical is a schema to understand the relationship of the elements in any particular communication. Additionally, more than one interpretation of text is possible depending on the reader’s culture. The brief example in this reading did not identify the situation. The text refers to a hold and considering escape. Subsequently, the reader learns that the passage refers to wrestling though a reader might project the schema of prison onto the text.
The thesis of this article is that comprehension is a matter of either building or activating a schema facilitating a coherent understanding of objects and events to form meaning of sentences and paragraphs to understand the whole message. A schema provides ideational scaffolding to support the listener in assimilating information. Metaphorically, schema provides a slot for the main entrée of information or parallel CSI information for solving mysteries. If the reader has a schema, the information enters into memory and other cognitive processes with relative ease and speed. Schema provides a way of allocating attention paid to information and selecting what are important aspects in the text. Additionally schema enables and allows:
Inferential elaboration: go beyond the text for what is not clear
Orderly memory searches: what was the appetizer? Soup? Etc.
Editing and summarizing: reader produces significant summaries
Inferential reconstruction: generate hypothesis about missing info
To be fair, a student must have schema created and must develop all of the above functions of schema in order to make sense of text. (This reminds me that a graduate student venturing to study content and evidence-based curriculum of a profession not previously studied finds initial contact with Tier 3 vocabulary extremely challenging. No doubt, this is the basis for a new reality TV series focusing on cognition survival.)
The awareness of the role of schema theory on comprehension would help the teacher differentiate between the students who cannot understand because of compromised cognitive abilities from the one who is merely lacking necessary schema. Similarly, culturally sensitive topics offer varying interpretations and an educator who is aware of these alternatives can listen with a multidimensional inner ear. Additionally, emotional responses to content can vary if material is offensive or insensitive to the state of being of the reader.
This article cited two food passages (one from a supermarket and one from a restaurant). Recall from the restaurant menu text was greater than for the supermarket items precisely because it matters more what one orders from a menu than what one throws into a supermarket cart. Hence, the amount of engagement with the text matters.
When readers were assigned roles during the reading of text, they learned more, e.g. pretending an identity before reading a text framed the breadth and depth of information accessed. Then when switching roles, learners continued to hold information from the first role yet learned the information in depth from the second role as well.
Relevant knowledge activated before learning builds schema for approaching text and promotes comprehension. Additionally, prediction techniques, such as Directed Reading-Thinking Activity causes readers to search their stored knowledge developing prediction. This group recalled 72% of the sentences in a study by Anderson, Mason, and Shirey (1984) while others’ recall was a mere 43%.
The author urges publishers to employ devices that highlight the structure of text material, provide advance organizers or structured overviews to facilitate comprehension. Additionally, be alert to culturally different schemata of students who are not part of the mainstream culture. However, the author feels that it is safe to assume the children from various subcultures will ascribe the same goals and motives to characters and imagine the same sequence of actions, predict the same emotional reactions or expect the same outcomes.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Chapter 38
Summary of Beating the Odds: Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well
By Judith Langer
For Michael Cameron and the class by Susan Conklin
RDG 461
Simmons College/The Reading Institute
This was a five-year study on characteristics of educational practice regarding student achievement in reading, writing, and English. The study included middle and high schools from New York, Florida, Texas, and California. The researcher was interested in students gaining high literacy rather than just enough to get by. Basic reading and writing considered together with the ability to use language, content and reasoning approaches to be commensurate with “educated” persons. Students need the ability to read social meanings, rules, structures and linguistic and cognitive routines to solve problems in their world. Students capacity to understand how reading, writing, language, content and social appropriateness work together and how they might be thoughtful in reading, writing, and discussion to put knowledge and skills to use in new situations is the goal of high literacy.
This research is rooted in a sociocognitive perspective, i.e. learning influenced by values, experiences, and actions that exist within the larger environment. Student voices would contribute to experiences in the classroom, how it is learned, what counts as appropriate and meaningful.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural framework (1987) suggested that teacher-student learning occurs in an environment where both can participate in thoughtful examination and discourse about language and content. The learning of skill is dependent on the environment in which the students are learning.
Related Research by Applebee and Squire (1968) contrasted “award winning” with “recommended” programs with a focus on professionalism of teachers, availability of resources for instruction, emphasis on the teaching of literature but a lack of attention to the needs of lower-track students. Applebee (1993) studies teachers in successful programs also as highly professionalized, more resources available, and more community support for their efforts. Additionally, they emphasized more process-oriented writing instruction, active involvement of students in discussion, and reader-response approaches to literature resulting from better funding rather than difference approaches to curriculum and instruction. Consequently, there was no way to track differences in instruction to student achievement. Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, and Hampston (1998) found that the most effective teachers characterized by high academic engagement in challenging literacy tasks, explicit teaching of skills, interconnections among activities, and careful matching of tasks and instruction to student competence levels. Research by Taylor, Pearson, Clark and Walpole (1999) found that the important factors in teacher effectiveness were parental support, systematic assessment of student progress, good communication among staff within the building, and a collaborative model for the delivery of reading instruction.
This researcher noted that there were no studies regarding the features of instruction that differentiate the higher from the lower performing middle and high school programs. Langer (2000) reported that the professional lives of teachers supported students.
There are six issues at the center of the literacy debate:
1. Approaches to skills instruction
2. Approaches to test preparation
3. Connected Learning
4. Enabling Strategies
5. Conceptions of Learning
6. Classroom Organization
1. There is an ongoing debate about the manner of instruction delivery: some like Dewey (1938) feel that experience-based instruction is important while others stress the mastery of concepts and skills through decontextualizing practice (Bloom 1971). Hirsch (1996) calls for students to remember culturally potent facts and genre theorists call for the teaching of organization of written forms. Goodman and Wilde (1992) seek skills and knowledge of authentic literacy activity while teacher tend to blur distinctions and blend theorists with dissimilar approaches. The danger here is that watered-down form eliminates the teaching of some significant aspects of best practices.
2. An aspect of systemic reform requires that there be alignment between curriculum and assessment with a focus on achievement scores. How this is done is controversial. Some educators simple practice sample test items and teach test-taking skills, i.e. how to choose the best answer or how to write the best response. Others advocate the teaching of needed literacy abilities throughout the year also with test results as the focus. The latter focuses on test scores and learning through improving curriculum while the former focuses only on test scores.
3. Student learning is enhanced when connections can be made to prior knowledge gained from in and out-of-school experiences rather than treating material as though it is entirely new. These connections must be explicit.
4. Student strategic awareness to learning and performance together with the teaching of strategies for reading, writing, and thinking tasks are as important. Students should learn intentional ways of thinking and doing along with process of content. Student awareness of strategy is important.
5. Some teachers focus on facts and concepts while others focus on student abilities to think about and use new knowledge. Earlier, giving definitions, selecting right answers, and filling in information into sentences and charts was evidence and learning. Recently two bodies of research changed that: one focused on disciplinary initiation, helping students learn better similar to expert thinkers (verbal protocol analysis research) and the other on critical thinking with higher levels of cognitive manipulation of the material. Currently however, the name of the game is engagement: beyond time on task to student engagement with the material. Students should deal analytically with challenging material on a grade-appropriate level with challenging subject mater and apply this knowledge to real-world situations.
6. Finally, students learn with substantive interactions with one another as well as with the teacher. Collaborative approaches with groups and clubs for literature, writing, and envisionment-building thought processes are a response to research and theory. The idea is to create supportive environments to bring personal, cultural, and academic knowledge to the interaction as students play multiple roles of learners, teachers, and inquirers. Students can become problem solvers and problem generators.
Langer’s study focused on the workings of schools, teachers, and classrooms that strive to increase student performance and despite obstacles and difficulties of serving the poor beat the odds on standardized tests in reading and writing and gained higher literacy.
The method of the study was a five-year period with observations and interviews as well as identification and testing of patterns to take place over time. Researchers studied each school extensively for two years in patterns of curriculum and instruction. They selected the states mentioned above to include diversity in student population, educational problems and approaches to improvement. They identified schools that were performing better than the typical school with similar demographics for the study. Many schools were recommended and the final selections was based on a combination of test scores, diversity of population, problems, locations, and teachers’ and administrators’ willingness to work with them over a two-year period.
Teachers within schools included English teachers in the context of their teams, departments, districts, and those who achieved with unusually good results in spite of the context in which they worked. Teachers had three distinct patterns:
1. Exemplary teachers in supportive environments with strong curriculum and supports provided to everyone,
2. Teachers who achieved due to professionalism unrelated to the school and without support to student achievement beyond school,
3. Those dedicated to their students and working in a system of traditions with expectations, lacking support for their growth, minus consensus for instruction, and did not go beyond the accomplishments of comparable schools.
The design of the study considered program, teacher, and student. The team of researchers studied one or more programs for two years including instructional concerns, plans and enactments over time with two sets of students. All teachers and schools were considered good. Fourteen of the twenty-five schools were out performing demographically similar schools.
The researchers’ procedures included five weeks a year at each site: interviewing district personnel, teachers, and students about goals, plans, and perceptions. Researchers gathered initial observations of the classes and plans for the year ahead. They also used informal interviews with teachers and students, shadowing teachers, and using email accounts or phone conversations for weekly contacts with teachers and students to discuss ongoing classroom activities.
Parallel data from each site included field notes, school and professional experience artifacts, tape recordings and transcripts of all interviews and observed class sessions, and case reports by field researchers. Data was collected by full-team, collaborative dyads, and case-study sessions.
All data coded for the type of community and participants. Data analyzed a system of constant comparison patterns identified within and across cases for two years regarding the six features of instruction mentioned earlier.
The results: active and engaged students and teachers in academically rich classroom marked all. The teachers had a sense of professionalism, dedication and knowledge as well as collaborative participation with students. Students learned the functions and uses of language, how it works in context, how to use language for specific purposes and had a great deal of high literacy. They learned grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and organizational structure with carefully planned activities that focused directly on structure and use of the English language. Students explored their understanding, prepared presentations, and polished final products.
Three distinct approaches: separated, simulated, and integrated characterized the approaches to skill instruction. Separated is direct instruction of isolated skills and knowledge outside of context and through introduction, practice, or review. Teacher tells the facts and focuses on lists of vocabulary, spelling and rules. Separated activity highlights particular skills, items, or rules. Simulated instruction is the application of those concepts and rules within a targeted unit of reading, writing, or oral language. Students are expected to read or write short units of text with purpose of practicing skill or concept. Students find examples of that skill or concept. Teachers develop tasks for the purpose of practice. Integrated instructions expect students to use their skills and knowledge as writing a letter, report, poem, or play for a particular goal such as class newspaper. Successful teachers were more likely to use the above three approaches. Literature circles provided students with an opportunity for the use of skills and knowledge in roles that changed weekly: discussion director, literary luminary, vocabulary enricher, summarizer, and connector.
Approaches to test preparation revealed two approaches: separated activities, test practice and test-taking hints while a second approach integrated test preparation with the regular curriculum by analyzing test demands and reformulating curriculum to help students develop the necessary skills to perform. Most successful teachers integrated the skills and knowledge that was to be tested as their dominant approach to test preparation. Tests were opportunities to revise curriculum. Students actively learned to be reflective in their reading and writing and sometimes included rubrics. Connections between curriculum and real life experiences enhanced learning. Teachers developed instructional strategies that crated yearlong experiences in different types of wring including organization, elaboration, and polishing. Sometimes students developed multiple-choice questions of their own for others to answer. Student work discussed in class connected to how it might be useful in life. Work reviewed later in the week, day, or year reinforced learning and memory. Teachers selectively used materials and created activities because they knew that their students needed to practice skills and knowledge.
In typically performing schools, teachers regarded test preparation as an additional hurdle separated from literacy curriculum. Practice was in old editions of the test, teacher-made tests, and practice materials using similar formats and questions to the test. They were taught how to take a test rather than how to gain and use the skills and knowledge tested. Teachers tended to blame the students rather than themselves and believed that the students were not capable of scoring. In contrast, high performing schools focused on students overall learning with improved language arts learning.
Teachers overtly pointed out connections among three different kinds of student learning: concepts and experiences within lessons, across lessons, classes, and even grades as well as connections between in-school and out-of-school knowledge and experiences. One example includes students who interact with seniors and interact with them to write a character sketch. Another teacher wanted her students to connect across the curriculum and with life to learn to read the text and the world. In the typical schools, little interweaving was done. Typical teachers treated class lessons as separate wholes. Lack of connectedness across curriculum reflected in the larger curriculum revealed lack of integration of materials.
The more successful teachers taught their students strategies for organizing their thoughts and completing tasks. This guided the students in how to do well. Sometimes the students were provided models, lists, and evaluation rubrics. High achieving teachers taught students to think about writing, speaking, thinking, reviewing, revising, reflecting and editing. Teachers shared and discussed these rubrics with students and helped them to develop relevant strategies to reading. Students led into deep and substantive discussions for critical thinking. Literature circle time with her students’ went beyond the texts.
Classroom organization focused on instruction as a social activity with depth and complexity of understanding. Students engaged in teamwork to test ideas and arguments. Students are taught to work together, discuss issues, and react to each other with the idea that individuals learn best from each other. Additionally, teacher expectations explicitly stated provided clear guidance for the development of perspicacious students. Teachers treated students as members of a dynamic learning culture necessary to support learning. Students were more actively engaged in school when literacy was treated as a social activity.
In summary, higher literacy is based on the belief that all students can learn and can integrate knowledge in broader activities with continued practice over time.
The implications of cohesive underlying approaches to instruction are clear and present. Studying these features and placing them in schools will affect student performance.
By Judith Langer
For Michael Cameron and the class by Susan Conklin
RDG 461
Simmons College/The Reading Institute
This was a five-year study on characteristics of educational practice regarding student achievement in reading, writing, and English. The study included middle and high schools from New York, Florida, Texas, and California. The researcher was interested in students gaining high literacy rather than just enough to get by. Basic reading and writing considered together with the ability to use language, content and reasoning approaches to be commensurate with “educated” persons. Students need the ability to read social meanings, rules, structures and linguistic and cognitive routines to solve problems in their world. Students capacity to understand how reading, writing, language, content and social appropriateness work together and how they might be thoughtful in reading, writing, and discussion to put knowledge and skills to use in new situations is the goal of high literacy.
This research is rooted in a sociocognitive perspective, i.e. learning influenced by values, experiences, and actions that exist within the larger environment. Student voices would contribute to experiences in the classroom, how it is learned, what counts as appropriate and meaningful.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural framework (1987) suggested that teacher-student learning occurs in an environment where both can participate in thoughtful examination and discourse about language and content. The learning of skill is dependent on the environment in which the students are learning.
Related Research by Applebee and Squire (1968) contrasted “award winning” with “recommended” programs with a focus on professionalism of teachers, availability of resources for instruction, emphasis on the teaching of literature but a lack of attention to the needs of lower-track students. Applebee (1993) studies teachers in successful programs also as highly professionalized, more resources available, and more community support for their efforts. Additionally, they emphasized more process-oriented writing instruction, active involvement of students in discussion, and reader-response approaches to literature resulting from better funding rather than difference approaches to curriculum and instruction. Consequently, there was no way to track differences in instruction to student achievement. Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, and Hampston (1998) found that the most effective teachers characterized by high academic engagement in challenging literacy tasks, explicit teaching of skills, interconnections among activities, and careful matching of tasks and instruction to student competence levels. Research by Taylor, Pearson, Clark and Walpole (1999) found that the important factors in teacher effectiveness were parental support, systematic assessment of student progress, good communication among staff within the building, and a collaborative model for the delivery of reading instruction.
This researcher noted that there were no studies regarding the features of instruction that differentiate the higher from the lower performing middle and high school programs. Langer (2000) reported that the professional lives of teachers supported students.
There are six issues at the center of the literacy debate:
1. Approaches to skills instruction
2. Approaches to test preparation
3. Connected Learning
4. Enabling Strategies
5. Conceptions of Learning
6. Classroom Organization
1. There is an ongoing debate about the manner of instruction delivery: some like Dewey (1938) feel that experience-based instruction is important while others stress the mastery of concepts and skills through decontextualizing practice (Bloom 1971). Hirsch (1996) calls for students to remember culturally potent facts and genre theorists call for the teaching of organization of written forms. Goodman and Wilde (1992) seek skills and knowledge of authentic literacy activity while teacher tend to blur distinctions and blend theorists with dissimilar approaches. The danger here is that watered-down form eliminates the teaching of some significant aspects of best practices.
2. An aspect of systemic reform requires that there be alignment between curriculum and assessment with a focus on achievement scores. How this is done is controversial. Some educators simple practice sample test items and teach test-taking skills, i.e. how to choose the best answer or how to write the best response. Others advocate the teaching of needed literacy abilities throughout the year also with test results as the focus. The latter focuses on test scores and learning through improving curriculum while the former focuses only on test scores.
3. Student learning is enhanced when connections can be made to prior knowledge gained from in and out-of-school experiences rather than treating material as though it is entirely new. These connections must be explicit.
4. Student strategic awareness to learning and performance together with the teaching of strategies for reading, writing, and thinking tasks are as important. Students should learn intentional ways of thinking and doing along with process of content. Student awareness of strategy is important.
5. Some teachers focus on facts and concepts while others focus on student abilities to think about and use new knowledge. Earlier, giving definitions, selecting right answers, and filling in information into sentences and charts was evidence and learning. Recently two bodies of research changed that: one focused on disciplinary initiation, helping students learn better similar to expert thinkers (verbal protocol analysis research) and the other on critical thinking with higher levels of cognitive manipulation of the material. Currently however, the name of the game is engagement: beyond time on task to student engagement with the material. Students should deal analytically with challenging material on a grade-appropriate level with challenging subject mater and apply this knowledge to real-world situations.
6. Finally, students learn with substantive interactions with one another as well as with the teacher. Collaborative approaches with groups and clubs for literature, writing, and envisionment-building thought processes are a response to research and theory. The idea is to create supportive environments to bring personal, cultural, and academic knowledge to the interaction as students play multiple roles of learners, teachers, and inquirers. Students can become problem solvers and problem generators.
Langer’s study focused on the workings of schools, teachers, and classrooms that strive to increase student performance and despite obstacles and difficulties of serving the poor beat the odds on standardized tests in reading and writing and gained higher literacy.
The method of the study was a five-year period with observations and interviews as well as identification and testing of patterns to take place over time. Researchers studied each school extensively for two years in patterns of curriculum and instruction. They selected the states mentioned above to include diversity in student population, educational problems and approaches to improvement. They identified schools that were performing better than the typical school with similar demographics for the study. Many schools were recommended and the final selections was based on a combination of test scores, diversity of population, problems, locations, and teachers’ and administrators’ willingness to work with them over a two-year period.
Teachers within schools included English teachers in the context of their teams, departments, districts, and those who achieved with unusually good results in spite of the context in which they worked. Teachers had three distinct patterns:
1. Exemplary teachers in supportive environments with strong curriculum and supports provided to everyone,
2. Teachers who achieved due to professionalism unrelated to the school and without support to student achievement beyond school,
3. Those dedicated to their students and working in a system of traditions with expectations, lacking support for their growth, minus consensus for instruction, and did not go beyond the accomplishments of comparable schools.
The design of the study considered program, teacher, and student. The team of researchers studied one or more programs for two years including instructional concerns, plans and enactments over time with two sets of students. All teachers and schools were considered good. Fourteen of the twenty-five schools were out performing demographically similar schools.
The researchers’ procedures included five weeks a year at each site: interviewing district personnel, teachers, and students about goals, plans, and perceptions. Researchers gathered initial observations of the classes and plans for the year ahead. They also used informal interviews with teachers and students, shadowing teachers, and using email accounts or phone conversations for weekly contacts with teachers and students to discuss ongoing classroom activities.
Parallel data from each site included field notes, school and professional experience artifacts, tape recordings and transcripts of all interviews and observed class sessions, and case reports by field researchers. Data was collected by full-team, collaborative dyads, and case-study sessions.
All data coded for the type of community and participants. Data analyzed a system of constant comparison patterns identified within and across cases for two years regarding the six features of instruction mentioned earlier.
The results: active and engaged students and teachers in academically rich classroom marked all. The teachers had a sense of professionalism, dedication and knowledge as well as collaborative participation with students. Students learned the functions and uses of language, how it works in context, how to use language for specific purposes and had a great deal of high literacy. They learned grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and organizational structure with carefully planned activities that focused directly on structure and use of the English language. Students explored their understanding, prepared presentations, and polished final products.
Three distinct approaches: separated, simulated, and integrated characterized the approaches to skill instruction. Separated is direct instruction of isolated skills and knowledge outside of context and through introduction, practice, or review. Teacher tells the facts and focuses on lists of vocabulary, spelling and rules. Separated activity highlights particular skills, items, or rules. Simulated instruction is the application of those concepts and rules within a targeted unit of reading, writing, or oral language. Students are expected to read or write short units of text with purpose of practicing skill or concept. Students find examples of that skill or concept. Teachers develop tasks for the purpose of practice. Integrated instructions expect students to use their skills and knowledge as writing a letter, report, poem, or play for a particular goal such as class newspaper. Successful teachers were more likely to use the above three approaches. Literature circles provided students with an opportunity for the use of skills and knowledge in roles that changed weekly: discussion director, literary luminary, vocabulary enricher, summarizer, and connector.
Approaches to test preparation revealed two approaches: separated activities, test practice and test-taking hints while a second approach integrated test preparation with the regular curriculum by analyzing test demands and reformulating curriculum to help students develop the necessary skills to perform. Most successful teachers integrated the skills and knowledge that was to be tested as their dominant approach to test preparation. Tests were opportunities to revise curriculum. Students actively learned to be reflective in their reading and writing and sometimes included rubrics. Connections between curriculum and real life experiences enhanced learning. Teachers developed instructional strategies that crated yearlong experiences in different types of wring including organization, elaboration, and polishing. Sometimes students developed multiple-choice questions of their own for others to answer. Student work discussed in class connected to how it might be useful in life. Work reviewed later in the week, day, or year reinforced learning and memory. Teachers selectively used materials and created activities because they knew that their students needed to practice skills and knowledge.
In typically performing schools, teachers regarded test preparation as an additional hurdle separated from literacy curriculum. Practice was in old editions of the test, teacher-made tests, and practice materials using similar formats and questions to the test. They were taught how to take a test rather than how to gain and use the skills and knowledge tested. Teachers tended to blame the students rather than themselves and believed that the students were not capable of scoring. In contrast, high performing schools focused on students overall learning with improved language arts learning.
Teachers overtly pointed out connections among three different kinds of student learning: concepts and experiences within lessons, across lessons, classes, and even grades as well as connections between in-school and out-of-school knowledge and experiences. One example includes students who interact with seniors and interact with them to write a character sketch. Another teacher wanted her students to connect across the curriculum and with life to learn to read the text and the world. In the typical schools, little interweaving was done. Typical teachers treated class lessons as separate wholes. Lack of connectedness across curriculum reflected in the larger curriculum revealed lack of integration of materials.
The more successful teachers taught their students strategies for organizing their thoughts and completing tasks. This guided the students in how to do well. Sometimes the students were provided models, lists, and evaluation rubrics. High achieving teachers taught students to think about writing, speaking, thinking, reviewing, revising, reflecting and editing. Teachers shared and discussed these rubrics with students and helped them to develop relevant strategies to reading. Students led into deep and substantive discussions for critical thinking. Literature circle time with her students’ went beyond the texts.
Classroom organization focused on instruction as a social activity with depth and complexity of understanding. Students engaged in teamwork to test ideas and arguments. Students are taught to work together, discuss issues, and react to each other with the idea that individuals learn best from each other. Additionally, teacher expectations explicitly stated provided clear guidance for the development of perspicacious students. Teachers treated students as members of a dynamic learning culture necessary to support learning. Students were more actively engaged in school when literacy was treated as a social activity.
In summary, higher literacy is based on the belief that all students can learn and can integrate knowledge in broader activities with continued practice over time.
The implications of cohesive underlying approaches to instruction are clear and present. Studying these features and placing them in schools will affect student performance.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Chapter 25: Building Representation of Informational Text: Evidence From Children's Think-Aloud Protocols
In the article, “Building Representation of Informational Text: Evidence From Children’s Think Aloud Protocols, Natalie Cote and Susan Goldman investigate strategies children use to comprehend unfamiliar expository text. One such strategy is the think-aloud process which allows researchers to see the processes and thoughts children have while they process expository text. Research has shown the think-aloud method helps the reader to remember text and solve problems better than if the method was not used.
Several assumptions about the processing involved in constructing cognitive representations of text:
1. Sequential processing of information from text
2. A connection of new information and prior knowledge are brought together in working memory and then are stored as a partial representation
3. During the reading process, readers build different representation simultaneously. One such example is making a hypothesis about the text while taking in information directly from the page.
4. Relationships between two units of text information, or between information from the text and information received from long-term memory, can only be detected or generated if the pieces of information are active in working memory at the same time
5. Working memory has a limited capacity
For the study, the participants consisted of 16 sixth grade children ranging in ages 11 to 13. The students were asked to read four passages that contained material new to them. Of the four passages, two were on the more-familiar topics of and two were on the less-familiar topics. Students read these articles at two different times in the year: at mid-year and at the end of the year. At each session, they read two articles, one containing a familiar topic and one containing a less-familiar topic. During these sessions the student were instructed to use the think-aloud strategy so researchers could hear what the children were thinking. This allowed the researchers to know what was hard, what was understood or misunderstood which in turn shows researchers what strategies the children used in order to comprehend the test they read.
The two texts that contained unfamiliar information were about metabolism and hybrids. The Metabolism text is about factors that affect metabolism or metabolic rate and gives some explicit information about metabolic rate in separate paragraphs (such as food, climate, activity, and genetic inheritance). In order to understand how metabolic rate, energy source and energy requirements are related, the reader must integrate information from several text paragraphs and prior knowledge about the body. Readers who do not possess prior knowledge about this topic will be heavily dependent on the explicit information in the text for making the inferences and connections necessary for understanding. The second text is about hybrids and their helpfulness to Mother Nature. While the Metabolism passage implicitly expressed a complex relationship among a concept and the factors affecting it (causing a reader to use inference), the Hybrids text did not. Instead, this passage contains a number of situations and examples of hybrids and how they are helpful, which is information not requiring the use of inference.
Cote and Goldman studied the coding and analyses in terms of the types of five comprehension and reasoning strategies and processes that individuals use when coming across difficult text. Five categories emerged. They are self-explanation, monitoring, paraphrasing, predicting, and associations.
· Self-Explanations-Within this category, students work on making meaning out of the sentence from prior knowledge and contextual cues found in the text.
· Monitoring- Confirmation of comprehension (whether accurate or not) occurs in this category. These statements signify an evaluation of comprehension where students are comparing their sense of understanding to some internal criterion of satisfactory meaning.
· Paraphrasing- This is used to maintain information in working memory. By changing words while keeping the same context, this allows students to connect new information to any prior knowledge, they possess about the topic.
· Predictions- Statements that tell what students expect to find further in their reading. If confirmation of the prediction occurs, the new information helps to create a logical connection to prior information.
· Associations- Statements that do not aid in comprehension of the focal sentence, but do provide a link to the student’s prior knowledge.
Cote and Goldman found that out of the five categories presented earlier, self- explanation and monitoring protocol were most used by students. They did not often call upon the other strategies and when they did, they did not have much success in using them. For example, students who used prediction as a strategy often struggled within the information in the expository text to predict successfully what would come next.
The researchers did an analysis of types of protocol events to understand how children capture reasoning and comprehension strategies while they construct a representation of the text. During a second analysis, Cote and Goldman were looking at the degree to which children were making connections among elements in the text and between text elements and prior knowledge. Three categories of reinstatements emerged; they are according to the source of the reinstated information.
Physical Reinstatements- Computer records allow the researchers to see the order in which students accessed and read the sentences in the passage. This allowed the researchers to be able to distinguish between prior texts that were physically reinstated or use of mental reinstatement from memory Consistent findings show many of the children spontaneously and selectively reinstated previously read sentences by re-exposing them physically.
Mental Reinstatements- Two types of mental reinstatements emerged during the think –aloud protocols.
Mental–Text- reinstatements made by the reader where previous information presented in the text were mentioned without physically looking at the material again.
Mental–Student Generated- reinstatements of prior knowledge about the text in which the student verbalized on earlier focal sentences are connected to the physical reinstatements.
The researchers feel that it would be to hard to analyze the individual protocols, instead to capture the nature of an individual student’s activities, four categories were developed.
· Successful Knowledge Building- students put an extreme effort into this type of processing. They were attempting to construct a coherent model of the central concepts and relations. To help with this, students engaged in activities such as cause/effect explanations, elaborations, and cross-text integrative inferences that identified the macrostructure of the text.
· Less-Successful Knowledge-Building- While these students also made an effort to understand the central concepts and relations expressed by the text, but their actions concerning monitoring comments and requests for information show that they were less successful in making a coherent representation. They were frequently seeking information from the text that the text did not provide.
· Text-Focused Processing- These students showed varying degrees of effort through paraphrasing, interpreting, questioning, and other activities but these were generally in response to single sentences rather than constructing a global representation.
· Minimalists- Students who gave verbalization on half or fewer of the text’s sentences resulting in protocols too poor to support a reliable analysis of their text processing. Possible explanations for this are lack of motivation or being familiar with the context.
The researchers gleamed from the categories that the more knowledge building their approach is; the more engaged they are in reinstatement and self-explanations. Thus making the think-aloud approach a useful and meaningful approach for children to use in trying to comprehend expository text.
Several assumptions about the processing involved in constructing cognitive representations of text:
1. Sequential processing of information from text
2. A connection of new information and prior knowledge are brought together in working memory and then are stored as a partial representation
3. During the reading process, readers build different representation simultaneously. One such example is making a hypothesis about the text while taking in information directly from the page.
4. Relationships between two units of text information, or between information from the text and information received from long-term memory, can only be detected or generated if the pieces of information are active in working memory at the same time
5. Working memory has a limited capacity
For the study, the participants consisted of 16 sixth grade children ranging in ages 11 to 13. The students were asked to read four passages that contained material new to them. Of the four passages, two were on the more-familiar topics of and two were on the less-familiar topics. Students read these articles at two different times in the year: at mid-year and at the end of the year. At each session, they read two articles, one containing a familiar topic and one containing a less-familiar topic. During these sessions the student were instructed to use the think-aloud strategy so researchers could hear what the children were thinking. This allowed the researchers to know what was hard, what was understood or misunderstood which in turn shows researchers what strategies the children used in order to comprehend the test they read.
The two texts that contained unfamiliar information were about metabolism and hybrids. The Metabolism text is about factors that affect metabolism or metabolic rate and gives some explicit information about metabolic rate in separate paragraphs (such as food, climate, activity, and genetic inheritance). In order to understand how metabolic rate, energy source and energy requirements are related, the reader must integrate information from several text paragraphs and prior knowledge about the body. Readers who do not possess prior knowledge about this topic will be heavily dependent on the explicit information in the text for making the inferences and connections necessary for understanding. The second text is about hybrids and their helpfulness to Mother Nature. While the Metabolism passage implicitly expressed a complex relationship among a concept and the factors affecting it (causing a reader to use inference), the Hybrids text did not. Instead, this passage contains a number of situations and examples of hybrids and how they are helpful, which is information not requiring the use of inference.
Cote and Goldman studied the coding and analyses in terms of the types of five comprehension and reasoning strategies and processes that individuals use when coming across difficult text. Five categories emerged. They are self-explanation, monitoring, paraphrasing, predicting, and associations.
· Self-Explanations-Within this category, students work on making meaning out of the sentence from prior knowledge and contextual cues found in the text.
· Monitoring- Confirmation of comprehension (whether accurate or not) occurs in this category. These statements signify an evaluation of comprehension where students are comparing their sense of understanding to some internal criterion of satisfactory meaning.
· Paraphrasing- This is used to maintain information in working memory. By changing words while keeping the same context, this allows students to connect new information to any prior knowledge, they possess about the topic.
· Predictions- Statements that tell what students expect to find further in their reading. If confirmation of the prediction occurs, the new information helps to create a logical connection to prior information.
· Associations- Statements that do not aid in comprehension of the focal sentence, but do provide a link to the student’s prior knowledge.
Cote and Goldman found that out of the five categories presented earlier, self- explanation and monitoring protocol were most used by students. They did not often call upon the other strategies and when they did, they did not have much success in using them. For example, students who used prediction as a strategy often struggled within the information in the expository text to predict successfully what would come next.
The researchers did an analysis of types of protocol events to understand how children capture reasoning and comprehension strategies while they construct a representation of the text. During a second analysis, Cote and Goldman were looking at the degree to which children were making connections among elements in the text and between text elements and prior knowledge. Three categories of reinstatements emerged; they are according to the source of the reinstated information.
Physical Reinstatements- Computer records allow the researchers to see the order in which students accessed and read the sentences in the passage. This allowed the researchers to be able to distinguish between prior texts that were physically reinstated or use of mental reinstatement from memory Consistent findings show many of the children spontaneously and selectively reinstated previously read sentences by re-exposing them physically.
Mental Reinstatements- Two types of mental reinstatements emerged during the think –aloud protocols.
Mental–Text- reinstatements made by the reader where previous information presented in the text were mentioned without physically looking at the material again.
Mental–Student Generated- reinstatements of prior knowledge about the text in which the student verbalized on earlier focal sentences are connected to the physical reinstatements.
The researchers feel that it would be to hard to analyze the individual protocols, instead to capture the nature of an individual student’s activities, four categories were developed.
· Successful Knowledge Building- students put an extreme effort into this type of processing. They were attempting to construct a coherent model of the central concepts and relations. To help with this, students engaged in activities such as cause/effect explanations, elaborations, and cross-text integrative inferences that identified the macrostructure of the text.
· Less-Successful Knowledge-Building- While these students also made an effort to understand the central concepts and relations expressed by the text, but their actions concerning monitoring comments and requests for information show that they were less successful in making a coherent representation. They were frequently seeking information from the text that the text did not provide.
· Text-Focused Processing- These students showed varying degrees of effort through paraphrasing, interpreting, questioning, and other activities but these were generally in response to single sentences rather than constructing a global representation.
· Minimalists- Students who gave verbalization on half or fewer of the text’s sentences resulting in protocols too poor to support a reliable analysis of their text processing. Possible explanations for this are lack of motivation or being familiar with the context.
The researchers gleamed from the categories that the more knowledge building their approach is; the more engaged they are in reinstatement and self-explanations. Thus making the think-aloud approach a useful and meaningful approach for children to use in trying to comprehend expository text.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Chapter 33
Chapter 33
“The Effect of Reader Stance on Students’ Personal Understanding of Literature”
Joyce E. Many reviews the results of the Rosenblatt study in which a reader’s understandings are varied depending on the reader’s personal version or individual interpretations. Many’s purpose of her study was to further explore the variations by investigating an older population. Her specific purposes were 1) to describe the stances taken in eighth-grade subjects’ responses to literature, 2) analyze the relationship between the reader’s stance in a response and the level of understanding reached in the response, and 3) analyze whether the relationship between reader stance and level of understanding is consistent across individual texts.
• Subjects- 26 male and 25 female eighth-graders, one school served students from low SES and the other serving students form middle to upper SES and one class was randomly selected from English classes at each school.
• Materials- three realistic short stories.
• Procedure- Results from an earlier pilot study were used to chose stories used in the actual study and to refine data collection procedures. For data collection, subjects read and then responded to the prompt “Write anything you want about the story you just read.” Data was then analyzed to determine the primary stance of the response as a whole and the level of understanding. Several different instruments were used that rated levels of reader stance on an efferent (information learned from reading) to aesthetic (literary experience and emotions) continuum and the levels of reader’s understanding.
• Results-
o Analyses of stances subject took revealed responses at all points on the efferent-to-aesthetic continuum. Most efferent responses tended to be on evaluating literary elements or on the author’s writing style. Many of the analyses of the literary works tended to be shallow, but not all. Both Rosenblatt and Many indicated that readers may fluctuate between an efferent and an aesthetic stance when reading. In 18 % of the total responses, no primary stance could be determined. 44% fell at the aesthetic end with 33% falling in the most aesthetic stance.
• Aesthetic responses often involved visual imaging or personal feelings/ identification with characters.
• One story evoked what Cochran-Smith called life-to-text connections. Readers related their own problems or experiences to those in the story.
• Some readers chose a primarily aesthetic stance and extended story lines while others wrote what they were thinking as they read. Some readers filled in the gaps to rationalize events or behaviors or related the story to other stories they had read.
o Analysis of the relationship between stance and level of understanding were fairly consistent across texts. Students who focused on the aesthetic stance were more likely to interpret, apply, and draw generalizations of story events to life or about the world. For students who focused on the ‘lived-through’ experience had a higher level of understanding then those who responded with no primary stance. All in all, the results indicated that the relationship between stance and level of understanding were not text specific.
• Conclusions- The aesthetic stance provided a literacy experience more meaningful and relevant. Those that were asked to take an efferent approach (i.e. literary elements such as plot, character development, etc.) responded with shallowness. Responses written from the aesthetic stance indicated higher levels of understanding. Stance is a factor affecting response to literature regardless of literary text. If teachers want to illicit personal meaning in literature, they should consider aesthetic teaching strategies that may invite open responses, give students time to respond, provide time for discussions, encourage connections, and focus attention on the lived-through experience of literature. Lastly, this study provided empirical support for use of the aesthetic stance.
“The Effect of Reader Stance on Students’ Personal Understanding of Literature”
Joyce E. Many reviews the results of the Rosenblatt study in which a reader’s understandings are varied depending on the reader’s personal version or individual interpretations. Many’s purpose of her study was to further explore the variations by investigating an older population. Her specific purposes were 1) to describe the stances taken in eighth-grade subjects’ responses to literature, 2) analyze the relationship between the reader’s stance in a response and the level of understanding reached in the response, and 3) analyze whether the relationship between reader stance and level of understanding is consistent across individual texts.
• Subjects- 26 male and 25 female eighth-graders, one school served students from low SES and the other serving students form middle to upper SES and one class was randomly selected from English classes at each school.
• Materials- three realistic short stories.
• Procedure- Results from an earlier pilot study were used to chose stories used in the actual study and to refine data collection procedures. For data collection, subjects read and then responded to the prompt “Write anything you want about the story you just read.” Data was then analyzed to determine the primary stance of the response as a whole and the level of understanding. Several different instruments were used that rated levels of reader stance on an efferent (information learned from reading) to aesthetic (literary experience and emotions) continuum and the levels of reader’s understanding.
• Results-
o Analyses of stances subject took revealed responses at all points on the efferent-to-aesthetic continuum. Most efferent responses tended to be on evaluating literary elements or on the author’s writing style. Many of the analyses of the literary works tended to be shallow, but not all. Both Rosenblatt and Many indicated that readers may fluctuate between an efferent and an aesthetic stance when reading. In 18 % of the total responses, no primary stance could be determined. 44% fell at the aesthetic end with 33% falling in the most aesthetic stance.
• Aesthetic responses often involved visual imaging or personal feelings/ identification with characters.
• One story evoked what Cochran-Smith called life-to-text connections. Readers related their own problems or experiences to those in the story.
• Some readers chose a primarily aesthetic stance and extended story lines while others wrote what they were thinking as they read. Some readers filled in the gaps to rationalize events or behaviors or related the story to other stories they had read.
o Analysis of the relationship between stance and level of understanding were fairly consistent across texts. Students who focused on the aesthetic stance were more likely to interpret, apply, and draw generalizations of story events to life or about the world. For students who focused on the ‘lived-through’ experience had a higher level of understanding then those who responded with no primary stance. All in all, the results indicated that the relationship between stance and level of understanding were not text specific.
• Conclusions- The aesthetic stance provided a literacy experience more meaningful and relevant. Those that were asked to take an efferent approach (i.e. literary elements such as plot, character development, etc.) responded with shallowness. Responses written from the aesthetic stance indicated higher levels of understanding. Stance is a factor affecting response to literature regardless of literary text. If teachers want to illicit personal meaning in literature, they should consider aesthetic teaching strategies that may invite open responses, give students time to respond, provide time for discussions, encourage connections, and focus attention on the lived-through experience of literature. Lastly, this study provided empirical support for use of the aesthetic stance.
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