Project Activities
The research team refined the current version of SMD, developed new content and functionality, and conducted studies comparing the comprehension processes of good and poor readers. The research team used this information to refine the content and the lessons in SMD. Researchers then tested SMD and its associated instructional framework in middle and high school classrooms and made final refinements. The research team then conducted a series of field tests of implementations in literature and history classrooms.
Structured Abstract
Setting
This project took place in an urban district in Illinois.
Sample
Participants included 1002 students across grades 6 – 12.
SMD is a digital authoring tool that allows teachers and curriculum designers to input texts and supports for close reading. Supports include the ability to annotate text, hyperlinks for vocabulary and background knowledge, heuristic organizers, and sets of questions following coherent sections of text that guide the accumulation of meaning across texts. The final version of SMD now includes content for both literature and history, including student and teacher dashboards and functionality for researchers who may want to use the tool. Teacher dashboards allow teachers to view student progress across tasks and to annotate student work on tasks as feedback online.
Research design and methods
Researchers conducted basic studies on comprehension and development activities simultaneously in the first few years of the project. Basic studies included collecting “think aloud” data from students in order to understand how reading in literature differs from reading in history. A second basic study manipulated the presence or absence of heuristic supports within a discipline. Students were asked to think aloud with or without a heuristic support in both literature and history. A third and fourth basic study examined the presence or absence of an essay-writing support heuristic for literature and history, respectively. For all of the basic studies, the sample included students who scored proficient on assessments of reading and students who scored below proficient. Iterative development of the history content and the additional functionality of SMD also occurred during the initial years. The new functionality and content were tested for feasibility and usability in a small study. After final revisions, the fully developed SMD was field tested with students who participated the intervention to examine integration of the tool in instruction.
Control condition
There was no control condition in this project.
Key measures
Measures for this study included a pre-post assessment of students’ abilities to engage in disciplinary comprehension and reasoning in literature and history examining multiple texts. The assessment included tasks that required evidence of basic comprehension, a complex interpretive question requiring comparing and contrasting across the text sets, evidence of identifying key details that supported their claims with evidence, and the writing of a formal essay in response to the question. The rubric for the essay included criteria for evaluating argumentation, disciplinary reasoning, and quality of writing. In addition to the pre-post assessment, measures also included surveys of perceptions of instruction, epistemological beliefs about literature and history, beliefs about intelligence as fixed or malleable, beliefs about the ability to cope with challenge, and goals for learning (e.g. primarily for grades or motivated internally to learn).
Data analytic strategy
The research team used chi-square tests to examine shifts in pre-post scores that were categorical and paired samples t-tests to examine pre-post differences/shifts in scores that could be treated as continuous. They used analysis of covariance to examine where pre-test epistemological and learning beliefs contributed to post-test scores on writing rubrics over and above pre-test scores on the corresponding rubrics. The team engaged in qualitative analyses of student talk-alouds in basic studies and student pre-post assessments for the comprehension task in field tests They used detailed rubrics for qualitative analyses, calculating inter-rater reliability. The findings from these qualitative analyses were then used in the quantitative analyses.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
The project developed a digital tool – SenseMaking in the Disciplines – to support middle and high school students in close comprehension of disciplinary texts in literature and history. The team developed a pedagogical model to support middle and high school teachers of literature and history in designing discipline specific text sets and pedagogical practices that support students in learning to engage in deep disciplinary reasoning through careful analyses of texts.
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Publications:
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
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