Project Activities
The researchers evaluated the impacts of SWELL on reading and other outcomes for Spanish-speaking ELs each in grades 4 and 5. The research was implemented for one school year at each grade-level, with treatment teachers receiving professional development before starting the intervention and coaching during the school year. The treatment students used the intervention twice per week throughout the year. The researchers used surveys, teacher logs, classroom observations, and measures of reading, motivation, positive attitudes towards computer learning, and self-efficacy to evaluate the intervention's impact on student learning and achievement.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This study took place in two school districts in New Mexico and Texas where over 80% of students were Spanish speaking ELs.
Sample
The sample consisted of 3,425 students (1,724 in 4th grade; 1,701 in 5th grade) from 195 classrooms across 34 schools. Researchers grouped schools with similar characteristics into sites and then randomly assign them to treatment or control within sites.
The SWELL intervention instructed students about the text structure strategy with adaptations for Spanish speaking ELs. The structure strategy facilitates understanding of content area text by helping learners to organize concepts with cognitive structures that parallel those used to communicate main ideas in text. SWELL helps Spanish speaking ELs apply these strategies by guiding their selection of important ideas and supporting their construction of effective memory representations of content area texts. Specifically, students learned how to classify the text structure, generate a main idea with sentence stems, extend the main idea with supporting evidence to form a summary, and extrapolate inferences. To accomplish this, SWELL's intelligent tutoring system models text structure use, allows students to practice tasks, and provides immediate, formative feedback. SWELL has 65+ web-based interactive lessons, teacher professional development video components (in Spanish and English), physical classroom materials such as posters (in Spanish and English), a web-based lesson search utility, an administrator tool to generate student status reports, and a database with teacher resources for classroom use. Teachers who implemented SWELL received two days of professional development and four in-school coaching sessions, as well as materials to support their implementation of the intervention.
Research design and methods
This study used a multi-site cluster-randomized trial design with random assignment at the school level. Fourth and fifth grade teachers in treatment schools received two days of SWELL-related PD at the beginning of the school year, followed by four 90-minute coaching sessions over the course of the school year. Teachers in both the intervention and control conditions completed surveys at the beginning of the school year about their curriculum, materials, and classroom practices. Teachers also maintained web-based logs about their classroom practices for a week at a time at three different points during the school year. Researchers tested students in both conditions on a variety of outcomes at the beginning and end of the school year. Students in the treatment condition used the SWELL software for 30 minutes twice each week over the course of the school year. The researchers observed all classrooms twice during the school year. Teachers from control schools had the opportunity to receive SWELL's professional development and materials at the end of the school year after all data collection was completed.
Control condition
Students in the control condition received their district's standard reading curriculum and instruction.
Key measures
The primary measures for this study were the Gray Silent Reading Test and researcher-designed measures of reading comprehension (e.g., main idea competency), motivation to read, computer attitudes, and structure strategy self-efficacy.
Data analytic strategy
The researchers used a three-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) with students nested within classrooms within schools to evaluate SWELL's effect on reading and other outcomes.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
Publications:
Hudson, A. K., Owens, J., Moore, K. A., Lambright, K., & Wijekumar, K. (2021). "What's the main Idea?": Using text structure to build comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 75(1), 113-118.
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