Structured Abstract
Sample
Participants were students in grades 4 and 5 in low-performing urban schools in Western New York. It is expected that the population from which the participants of the study will be sampled will reflect characteristics of the district: age range 9 to 12; 71.6 percent will be minority students; 46.39 percent will be poor, with 73.2 percent receiving free or reduced lunch. The studies included more than 44 teachers and nearly 700 fourth- and fifth-grade students.
The WIRC intervention integrated reading comprehension instruction with writing instruction in collaborative, theme-based reading/writing workshops. The intervention emphasized work (hence the acronym) which places writing in the service of understanding reading and will include interactive discussions, writing activities, and planning and problem-solving tasks designed to scaffold the writing and reading of struggling comprehenders. The intervention depends largely on the use of ‘thinksheets.’ The goal of the thinksheets is to provide scaffolds for both the reading of and the writing about texts.
Research design and methods
Research methods consisted of quantitative and qualitative study of the effects of Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension (WIRC) instruction for randomly assigned students in fourth and fifth grade classrooms in low-performing urban schools. Quantitative methods focused on a three-year experimental study of the WIRC intervention using a randomized pretest-posttest control group design. Qualitative methods were used throughout the research to design, implement, and observe the intervention and consisted of videotaped and audiotaped classroom observations, participant observations, teacher logs, fidelity instruments, instructional materials, student writing and comments, teacher and student interviews, and formative assessments.
Key measures
Outcome measures for the randomized controlled trial included reading comprehension and writing performance.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Publications:
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Book chapters
Srihari, S., Collins, J., Srihari, R.K., Babu, P., and Srinivasan, H. (2006). Automatic Scoring of Handwritten Essays Using Latent Semantic Analysis. In H. Bunke, and L. Spitz (Eds.), Document Analysis Systems (pp. 71-83). New Zealand: Springer Nelson.
Journal articles
Collins, J.L., Lee, J., Fox, J.D., and Madigan, T.P. (2017). Bringing Together Reading and Writing: An Experimental Study of Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension in Low-Performing Urban Elementary Schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(3), 311-332.
Srihari, S., Collins, J., Srihari, R., Srinivasan, H., Shetty, S, and Brutt-Griffler, J. (2008). Automatic Scoring of Short Handwritten Essays in Reading Comprehension Tests. Artificial Intelligence, 172: 2-3.
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
