Structured Abstract
Sample
The research will involve classrooms of fifth grade students from high-poverty, low-achieving school districts. Minorities, chiefly African Americans, make up 40 percent or more of the districts' populations.
The proposed work is a series of design studies over 3 years in which we iteratively develop, implement, evaluate, and revise standardized instruction for strategies and content approaches to comprehension instruction.
Often design studies are very exploratory and are used to initially create instructional practices that conform to a theoretical conception or principle. However, there have already been instructional practices developed around strategies and content approaches. But because of the variety of instantiations and the often limited information about procedures included in reports of the research, many questions remain about implications for effective practice. Thus, the next step is to bound and standardize the instructional possibilities so the approaches can be reliably compared.
Research design and methods
The research method will be primarily quasi-experimental, as we will use intact classrooms to compare instructional conditions. Because of this design, background data will be collected to reveal comparability of the groups and to allow for statistical control of existing differences. In the final phase of the project, we will attempt to make the quasi-experiments better match the results obtainable from experimental design by working closely with the participating schools to obtain random assignment of students to classes.
Key measures
Measures will focus on comprehension of texts used in classroom lessons, analysis of classroom discourse, and pretesting and post-testing of the ability to monitor comprehension and transfer of enhanced comprehension to new texts.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Book chapters
McKeown, M.G., and Beck, I.L. (2009). The Role of Metacognition in Understanding and Supporting Reading Comprehension. In D.J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, and A.C. Graesser (Eds.), Handbook of Metacognition in Education (pp. 7-25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Journal articles
McKeown, M.G., Beck, I.L., and Blake, R.G.K. (2009). Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3): 218-253. doi:10.1598/RRQ.44.3.1
Questions about this project?
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