Dole, PhD, Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. Kim Nguyen-Jahiel, EdM, Bureau of Educational Research and Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, Illinois.
The Beck and M c caslin RepoRT
Beck and McCaslin (1978) examined actual programs used in the classrooms of American elementary schools. In this respected classic example of applying research to practice, Beck and McCaslin were clearly ahead of their time.
The Reading WaRs
Like Isabel's previous work, it is the result of many years of research in comprehension teaching. It is another outstanding book that should be in the hands of all teachers who care about their students.
It should be noted that Becoming a Nation of Readers was one of the best-selling books ever published on the subject of reading. Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (2000) is the report authored by the National Reading Panel, a panel appointed by the director of the National Institute of Child and Human Health Development, in consultation with the Ministry of Education.
The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research (2004), the most recent of the comprehensive reports on reading, was edited by Peggy McCardle and Vinita Chhabra, literacy experts from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction.
Influences ThaT MoTIvaTed The dIrecTIon of My Work
For he began by talking about design—specifically, fractional factorial research designs that could be used to carefully unpack the reading process. But the passion turned into one of those partial factorial studies of the reading process for my Ph.D.
Five developmental readers were created, corresponding to the five levels of first-grade basal readers used in classrooms. In the four-classroom study, we found that the fine-grained analysis (ie, the 37 categories) was sufficient to characterize the four classrooms.
Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of fifty-four children from first through fourth grades. There are few professional things that worry me as much as the thought that Isabel Beck will read what I'm writing.
Influences ThaT have MoTIvaTed My Work
Standard scores for students in the treatment group at the end of second grade were near the mean on the WRMT-R for word identification, word attack, and passage comprehension. Although many studies have reported improved outcomes for students following standard protocol interventions, individualized intervention is the hallmark of instruction for students with reading and learning disabilities (Cook & Schirmer, 2003).
Consensus reports of research on effective reading instruction and effective practices for teaching students with reading difficulties and disabilities agree that learning to read requires instruction that includes components of reading that include decoding words accurately and understanding their meaning, fluency, and comprehension (Biancarosa & Snow , 2004. Similarly, research suggests that effective teaching of students with reading difficulties and disabilities must include explicit and strategic strategies for word recognition and reading comprehension, with instruction in a framework that provides modeling and feedback (Foorman & Torgesen, 2001; Swanson, 1999a, 1999b).
Instructional components predicting treatment outcomes for students with learning disabilities: Support for a combined strategy and direct instruction model. Teaching English-speaking students at risk for reading difficulties to read: Putting research into practice.
Overview
My own journey on the path of reading reform began with a small grant from the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) in the mid-1990s and continued with the design, development, and administration of the Utah Governor's Initiative on Reading (Utah Reads). Finally, in the early 2000s, a colleague from the state office and I developed and wrote Utah's Reading First grant. My work in the early grades at these high-poverty schools led me on a new learning curve.
The resuLTs Of sysTemic reAding refOrm
The question of who was tested on the outcome measures became an issue over the years of the Reading First project. We do know that over the five years of the project, a higher percentage of students were tested in Reading First schools than in comparable schools. First, the principals involved in the REA project and Reading First differed in their involvement in the projects from the outset.
Learning Word Meanings froM Context
Swanborn and de Glopper's (1999) meta-analysis can be said to have settled the question of the rate of learning word meanings from context during reading. However, the question of the efficacy of deriving word meanings from context during reading as a source of vocabulary growth remains unresolved. This line of research represents the most comprehensive examination of the impact of vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension that has been conducted.
If this were true, we would have found greater amounts of learning from context for softer measures of word knowledge. Thus, the results supported a view of word learning in which word knowledge is acquired from context gradually, one small step at a time. Thus, both lines of research support an entirely incremental model of word learning (Nagy & Scott, 2000), underscoring the importance of repetition and revision in vocabulary learning.
Some effects of the nature and frequency of vocabulary instruction on the knowledge and use of words. One group – the higher knowledge group – was familiar with the meaning of almost all the words and gave accurate definitions for most of them. The other group – the lower knowledge group – was familiar with the meaning of most words, but provided precise definitions for less than a third of them.
This shift in the reader's mental model of the reading process leads to deeper understanding. The mentors would dramatically claim, "The problem here is that you're asking the wrong question." Unfortunately, guidance was always thin on what the right question was or, more to the point, what principles should guide the generation of good research questions. The chapter ends with a plea for someone to develop a "Question Writing Workbench". The workbench would train instructors, students, textbook writers, curriculum developers, test constructors, and other educational communities to construct better questions and thereby raise the standards of understanding beyond the current low standards.
The Landscape of QuesTions
To ask a question, the student points to a hot spot on the screen (eg the double reeds of an oboe) and clicks the mouse. A list of questions is then presented about the selected object or region of an object (eg, the double reeds of an oboe). The dialogue between AutoTutor and student typically takes between 50 and 200 rounds (ie the student expresses something, then the tutor, then the student and so on) before a good answer to this single physics question emerges.
Isabel Beck was a committee member, and a terrible one at that (at least for a first-year PhD student). Over the next 4 years, we conducted a comprehensive synthesis of text-based discussion research.1 We identified nine approaches to conducting discussion that demonstrated potential for promoting high-level student comprehension of text. One of the main findings of the meta-analysis was that discussion approaches promote high levels of text comprehension differently.
FOur elements OF Quality talk
And discussions that gave importance to a critical-analytic stance (PS, CR and P4C) were those in which teachers and students seemed to share control. We speculated that shared supervision between teacher and students helped to encourage knowledge-based and emotional engagement in more critical-analytical approaches. We believe that shared control between teachers and students in more critical-analytical discussions is responsible for richer reasoning.
Putting it all tOgether
Conversations emerge from this instructional context and support students' critically-reflective thinking about and around text. In our experience, we found that teachers needed some specificity about what critical-reflective thinking about text entailed—that is, to know what good thinking "looked like"—so that they knew when to engage in discussion to productively model and to support. conversation. Not shown in the figure are the modeling and scaffolding techniques that teachers can use to initiate students into the kinds of conversations that promote critical-reflective thinking.
PrOFessiOnal DevelOPment FOr Quality talk
We envision modeling and scaffolding as temporary support to guide the growth of Quality Talk in the early stages of implementing the model. At the workshop, we engaged teachers in Quality Talk discussions to enable them to experience what their students would experience. In the follow-up sessions, we allowed teachers to engage in collaborative problem solving regarding their use of Quality Talk.
Reinhart opened the discussion with a review of the rules of the game for conversation that she and the students created together in September. Pearson informed the students about the discussion question: "Who is Victor?" and wrote the question on the board. Pearson distributed copies of the story and instructed students to read either independently or in pairs.
We also have some evidence that using the model can produce effects that are consistent with our notion of a high level of understanding. We have reason to believe that elements of the model may need to be modified slightly for use with other genres. Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English, Columbus, Ohio.
Collaborative reasoning and Questioning the author
Collaborative discussions are characterized by long stretches where the teacher does not say anything (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001). Collaborative Reasoning primarily assumes a critical-analytical stance, meaning that students read and discuss the text to come to a reasoned decision about a dilemma (Anderson, Chinn, Waggoner, & Nguyen, 1998). In the final session, students engage in their second and final small group collaborative reasoning discussion.
Modes of reasoning during disCussions
In the following section from the first discussion, the students argue about whether people have good reasons for killing the wolves. Galeno: They [people] kill them because the wolves killed Elmo who was trying to protect the sheep. The first multi-step argument captured in this episode started with wolves killing large herbivores, followed by scavengers feeding on the remains of the wolves' kills.
