Teaching strategies to improve students’ vocabulary and text comprehension

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Good readers use various comprehension strategies to understand texts. However, many students lack knowledge on how to purposefully and effectively use...     

L1-assisted reciprocal teaching to improve ESL students’ comprehension of English expository text

A multiple-baseline design across three schools was used to investigate the effects of L1-assisted reciprocal teaching on 12 Year 7 and Year 8 (Grades 6 and 7) Taiwanese ESL students’ comprehension of English expository text. The intervention comprised the alternate use of L1 (Mandarin) and L2 (English) reciprocal teaching procedures. Through 15–20 days of instruction, students learned how to foster and monitor their comprehension by using the cognitive and metacognitive strategies of questioning, summarising, clarifying, and predicting. Students made gains on both researcher-developed and standardised tests of reading comprehension and showed evidence of qualitative changes in their comprehension processes when reading L1 and L2 texts.     

Intensifying instruction: Does additional instructional time make a difference for the most at-risk first graders?

Research is clear on the benefit of early intervention efforts and the importance of intensive instructional supports; however, understanding which features to intensify is less clear. General intervention features of group size, instructional delivery, and time are areas schools can consider manipulating to intensify instruction. Also, each of these features can vary along a continuum making them easier or more challenging for schools to implement. What is unclear is if implementing very intensive interventions early in school (first grade), which require significantly more school resources, provides accordingly accelerated student learning. This article investigates the role of intensifying instructional time for the most at-risk first graders in schools implementing research-based instructional and assessment practices within multitiered instructional support systems. Results indicate that students receiving more intensive intervention made significantly more progress across a range of early reading measures. Intervention features, limitations, recommendations for practice, and implications for treatment resisters are discussed.     

Does high-quality professional development make a difference? Evidence from TIMSS

Abstract

While professional development has been emphasised in many countries, few comparative studies have examined the degree of teachers’ participation in professional development and its effect on teachers. Using the TIMSS 2007 data, this study analyses to what extent teachers participated in professional development in 50 TIMSS countries and examines the relationship among high-quality teachers’ professional development, teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and job satisfaction. The study found that the extent to which teachers have participated in professional developmental activities was surprisingly low. In particular, teachers in 47 countries have rarely participated in active learning. The study also found that high-quality teacher professional development was significantly associated with greater job satisfaction, higher expectations for student performance and more positive attitudes in teachers concerning their implementing the school’s curriculum. Policy implications for professional development are discussed.     

Medicine as a calling among male and female medical students in Israel: Does it make a difference?

This study focused on the perception of medicine as a calling and its associations with medical training satisfaction, career certainty, career satisfaction, career commitment, and well-being among 176 Israeli medical students. Participants replied to an online questionnaire including the Brief Calling Scale (Duffy and Sedlacek in Career Dev Q 59:27–41, 2010) and measures related to medical training, a medical career, and well-being. Calling was positively associated with all outcome measures, and gender moderated these associations, which were stronger for female medical students in comparison with male medical students. The importance of taking these gender differences regarding calling under consideration for career counseling is discussed.     

What do students think when teachers make adaptations?

Eight hundred and seventy-six high school and middle school students provided information on their perceptions of adaptations teachers may make to accommodate the individual needs of their students. Additionally, achievement and social alienation were examined to determine the extent to which these variables relate to students' perceptions of teacher adaptations. Overall, students preferred teachers who made adaptations; however, item analyses revealed that students find some adaptations more desirable than others. Students felt positively about many adaptations that promote learning, but preferred that no adaptations be made to textbooks and materials, tests, and homework. While students' perceptions followed the same overall pattern for low and high achieving students, those students who preferred adaptations demonstrated significantly higher reading and mathematics achievement scores. Students who felt more alienated (less socially accepted) from their teachers were more likely to view favorably teachers who made adaptations. Students' comments about teachers who make adaptations indicate that they perceive these teachers as better able to meet the individual needs of students, caring and understanding of students, and willing to provide extra help.     

Does spelling instruction make students better spellers,readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review

Despite the importance of spelling for both writing and reading, there is considerable disagreement regarding how spelling skills are best acquired. During this and virtually all of the last century, some scholars have argued that spelling should not be directly or formally taught as such instruction is not effective or efficient. We conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies to address these claims. The corpus of 53 studies in this review included 6,037 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and yielded 58 effect sizes (ESs) that were used to answer eight research questions concerning the impact of formally teaching spelling on spelling, phonological awareness, reading, and writing performance. An average weighted ES was calculated for each question and the quality of included studies was systematically evaluated. Results provided strong and consistent support for teaching spelling, as it improved spelling performance when compared to no/unrelated instruction (ES = 0.54) or informal/incidental approaches to improving spelling performance (ES = 0.43). Increasing the amount of formal spelling instruction also proved beneficial (ES = 0.70). Gains in spelling were maintained over time (ES = 0.53) and generalized to spelling when writing (ES = 0.94). Improvements in phonological awareness (ES = 0.51) and reading skills (ES = 0.44) were also found. The positive outcomes associated with formal spelling instruction were generally consistent, regardless of students’ grade level or literacy skills.     

Emotional experiences during test taking: Does cognitive ability make a difference?

This study examined test-related experiences of enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom in a sample of 2059 German school students (50% female) from grade 6, and how they relate to students' abstract reasoning ability (ARA). Emotions were assessed immediately before, during, and after a mathematics achievement test. Analysis of variance showed that emotions experienced during the test situation differed based on students' ARA level, with correspondence analysis revealing substantial differences between the emotional profiles of different ability groups. Enjoyment proved to be most prominent in students with high ARA, whereas anger and anxiety were predominant for students with low ARA. Boredom was found to be highest among students in the intermediate ARA group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Price-induced substitution of faculty in academe: Does mission make a difference?

In an earlier paper Tuckman and Chang demonstrated that college faculty were substitutable and that differences in faculty salaries influenced the distribution of faculty by rank and sex. This paper uses a similar methodology to explore the question of whether institutions of high education with different missions have different substitution patterns and price elasticities. Our main conclusion is that price-related substitution does exist at each of the four types of colleges in our sample. However, the observed price effects are small and there is little evidence that any one college type is consistently more price responsive than any other.     

Sourcing in professional education: Do text factors make any difference?

The present study investigated the extent to which the text factors of source salience and emphasis on risk might influence readers’ attention to and use of source information when reading single documents to make behavioral decisions on controversial health-related issues. Participants (n = 259), who were attending different bachelor-level professional programs at a university college, generally disregarded source information irrespective of textual manipulations, especially sources cited or embedded within other documents, and mainly relied on their own personal experiences and opinions when making behavioral decisions on the issues. Theoretical as well as educational implications of the findings are discussed.     

Urban African‐American middle school science students: Does standards‐based teaching make a difference?

The current reform movement in science education promotes standards‐based teaching, including the use of inquiry, problem solving, and open‐ended questioning, to improve student achievement. This study examines the influence of standards‐based teaching practices on the achievement of urban, African‐American, middle school science students. Science classes of teachers who had participated in the professional development (n = 8) of Ohio's statewide systemic initiative (SSI) were matched with classes of teachers (n = 10) who had not participated. Data were gathered using group‐administered questionnaires and achievement tests that were specifically designed for Ohio's SSI. Analyses indicate that teachers who frequently used standards‐based teaching practices positively influenced urban, African‐American students' science achievement and attitudes, especially for boys. Additionally, teachers' involvement in the SSI's professional development was positively related to the reported use of standards‐based teaching practices in the classroom. The findings support the efficacy of high‐quality professional development to change teaching practices and to enhance student learning. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 1019–1041, 2000     

Stigmatic beliefs toward a person with Alzheimer’s disease among high-school students: Does majority–minority status make a difference?

Research in the area of public stigma and Alzheimer disease (AD) is attracting increased attention in the last years. However, studies are limited to assessing the topic among adult persons. The aims of this study were to assess stigmatic beliefs toward a person with AD in high-school students and to examine whether majority–minority status is associated with stigmatic beliefs beyond other correlates of stigma.

A total of 460 high-school students aged 14–15 participated in the study. Approximately half (55.1%) were female and the rest male. The majority of participants were Jewish (64.6%) and the rest were Israeli Arabs. Students completed a self-administered structured questionnaire assessing public stigma, ageism, knowledge about AD, and familiarity with AD.

Results showed that high-school students reported relatively low levels of stigmatic beliefs toward a person with AD. Additionally, the majority–minority status had a unique contribution to the explanation of stigma, with Arab high-school students reporting higher levels of stigma toward a person with AD in comparison to Jewish students.

Our results stress the importance of developing intervention programs to reduce stigma toward persons with AD at an early age. These programs should be tailored to the cultural values and needs of specific groups.     

Full-day kindergarten and student literacy growth: Does a lengthened school day make a difference?

In the context of a quasi-experimental research design, literacy data obtained on students were examined to assess relationships between kindergarten program model (full- vs. half-day) and student literacy outcomes. Application of multilevel modeling techniques to the time series data collected from kindergarteners in economically disadvantaged school contexts in a large southwestern school district revealed that students exposed to a full day of instruction had greater literacy growth than their peers in half-day classrooms. Further examination of the program model results revealed that the relative efficacy of full-day kindergarten tended to be greater in smaller class size environments. These results, if replicated, suggest that full-day kindergarten initiatives targeted toward students from disadvantaged backgrounds may be more successful when implemented in classrooms with relatively small student enrollments. Implications for instructional policy and practice are discussed.     

Does the treatment integrity of a literacy instruction program foster student reading comprehension? A field experiment

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study focuses on conditions that improve reading comprehension at grade 7th. We analyze the impact of the Lirécrire program, and...     

Does rhetorical competence moderate the effect of rhetorical devices on the comprehension of expository texts beyond general comprehension skills?

Many studies have demonstrated the facilitating role of rhetorical devices in text comprehension, but there are also studies where rhetorical devices have not shown such effect. The present study sets out to explore whether readers’ knowledge of rhetorical devices (that is, rhetorical competence) moderates their effectiveness beyond general comprehension skills and, consequently, whether rhetorical competence may be considered a component skill of reading comprehension. 192 sixth- to seventh-grade students were assessed on rhetorical competence and were required to read a difficult marked text with specific rhetorical devices (a refutation, an objective, and four organizational signals) or the same text without them. After reading, students produced a summary in order to obtain three dependent variables: main ideas (as a measure of participants’ ability to select relevant information from the text), causal links between them (as an indicator of participants’ ability to grasp the logical structure of the text and to organize its ideas), and the combination of main ideas plus causal links (as an indicator of participants’ global comprehension of the text). Analyses controlling for general comprehension skills and other important variables (working memory, prior knowledge, decoding) demonstrated that: (a) readers of the marked text scored higher in terms of all dependent variables, and (b) rhetorical competence level moderated the effect of rhetorical devices on the composite measure (main ideas plus causal links) and on the organization of the summary by means of causal links.     

How do people read the passages during a reading comprehension test? The effect of reading purpose on text processing behavior

In this study, we investigate the effect of reading purpose on students’ processing behavior during a reading comprehension test. In a repeated measures design, sixty undergraduates answered multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension questions in a condition with no overarching goal for reading and in an alternate condition where the same students were first provided with the goal of summarizing the text before answering MC questions. Results from eye tracking analysis showed that when students read and answered questions without an overarching goal, they spent much less time reading the passages before answering the questions, more time re-reading the texts while answering the questions, and more time on parts of the text that were not necessary to answer the questions. We conclude that providing examinees without an explicit goal for reading may inadvertently encourage a “search for the answer” reading process, rather than on building a coherent mental model of text content.     

Capturing teacher students’ emotional experiences in context: does inquiry-based learning make a difference?

In the present study teacher students?? contextual learning experiences were examined longitudinally in authentic study environments using the contextual activity sampling system, a means of mobile-supported experience sampling. The students?? (n?=?9) experiences were first recorded during a 2?week period in their first year of study. The same measurements were repeated again for a 2?week follow-up in the second year, accompanied by interviews before and after the follow-up. The first year of study consisted mostly of lectures and ordinary small-group work, whereas the second measurement period ran parallel to the completion of an intensive inquiry-based project, which was the focus of the present study. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that studying during the inquiry-based period produced stronger experiences of being challenged as well as negative affects than the teacher-centered period. The participants?? experiences of competence, commitment and positive affects did not differ during the two periods. However, interview data indicated that the participants enjoyed the inquiry-based period and that the work was intensive. Contextual data and interviews were also used to describe students?? experiences during one particular study session during the inquiry-based project. The results suggest that negative affects may be an essential part of the process of gradually learning to take responsibility for both individual and collaborative learning processes. Possibilities for using experience-sampling methods to analyze collaborative learning are also discussed.     

Assessing students’ performance by measured patterns of perceived strengths: does preference make a difference?

This paper is an empirical field study of whether college students’ preferences for assessment type correspond to their performance in assessment that tests that particular strength. For example, if students say they prefer assessment that tests their creativity, do they actually perform better on assessment tasks requiring the use of creativity? Seventy-eight students in three different courses were surveyed to determine their preferences in four types of assessment: memorisation, analysis, creativity and practical application. These preferences were then compared to student grades on corresponding forms of assessment to see if the preferences corresponded to actual performance. The study found that, while students had a clear preference for memorisation, they were not likely to deliver their best performances on memorisation tasks. There was no relationship at all between student preferences in assessment type and their performance in the respective assessments. These results indicate that, while in theory assessing students based on their preferences is reasonable for improved learning, we were not able to find evidence that it actually leads to higher performance.     

Does assessment for learning make a difference? The development of a questionnaire to explore the student response

Assessment for learning is a widely used term and the concept forms the basis of many teaching innovations in higher education. However, the definitions and scope of assessment for learning vary considerably. We describe a conceptualisation of assessment for learning that encompasses current thinking in a holistic way and which has been trialled and extensively refined in practice. A student questionnaire is presented which has enabled us to explore the student experience. Results indicate that the overall student experience is more positive in modules where assessment for learning approaches are used and students are more likely to take a deep approach to learning. It also demonstrates that the student experience is centred on staff support and module design, feedback, active engagement and peer learning. The full questionnaire is made available and its wider use in evaluation, enhancement and research is encouraged.