Comprehension Strategies Kit

Transcription

1 Comprehension Strategies Kit White Paper and Research Report

2 INTRODUCTION When it comes down to it, reading comprehension is a foundational literacy skill, a prerequisite to learning across the curriculum and a necessity of daily living. In order to define what the process of reading comprehension is and to identify effective instructional approaches so that students can succeed, an abundance of research has been conducted in this area. Reading comprehension is now understood to be an active and purposeful process whereby readers interact with the text in order to build an understanding of what they re reading. While less skilled readers process text at a relatively superficial level, skilled readers are adept at using strategies to interact with the text. These strategies include self-monitoring comprehension, making connections to background knowledge, visualizing, asking questions, generating predictions and inferences, and summarizing. According to the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, established by request of the National Academy of Sciences, failure to acquire and use comprehension skills and strategies is one of three primary obstacles to skilled reading (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1999). Reading comprehension strategies have been an important focus of reading comprehension research over the past several decades. Research into reading comprehension instruction has firmly established the effectiveness of explicit instruction of reading comprehension strategies in improving student comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley, 2001). Indeed, reading strategy instruction is viewed as essential to the prevention of reading difficulties (Snow et al., 1999). The extensive reading-comprehension research base addresses many different comprehension strategies. In this paper, research support for the following six strategies is highlighted: monitoring and clarifying comprehension, making connections to background knowledge, visualizing, asking questions, generating inferences and predictions, and summarizing. Monitor and Clarify Comprehension monitoring and clarification of meaning is a strategy whereby readers can self-monitor and regulate comprehension in an ongoing fashion and make corrections to keep themselves on track. The strategy is characteristic of skilled readers, whereas unskilled readers are poorly able to identify and/or correct textbased errors and comprehension failures. Studies have shown that there is a reliable relationship between comprehension monitoring and reading comprehension skill for elementary readers (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984). The National Reading Panel (2000) included comprehension monitoring in their list of eight procedures that have a firm scientific basis for improving comprehension. All 16 studies found to evaluate the impact of comprehension monitoring training on reader awareness of comprehension supported its effectiveness in this regard. They also identified five studies supporting improvement of error detection. As noted by the Panel, comprehension monitoring training includes providing readers with steps to clarify and repair reading problems through such steps as reviewing the text and restating what was read. The impact of comprehension monitoring training on reading comprehension is less wellestablished. Studies demonstrating improved comprehension monitoring have tended not to show significant effects on reading comprehension (De Corte, Verschaffel, & Van De Ven, 2001; Paris et al., 1984; Paris & Jacobs, 1984). The National Reading Panel report identified five studies showing significant reading comprehension improvement and two showing no improvement (National Reading Panel, 2000). However, the reading comprehension effects of comprehension monitoring training have generally been evaluated using standardized tests. This was the case for all studies identified by the National Reading Panel. It has been suggested that standardized tests are ill-suited to demonstrate the benefits of strategy use by virtue of their timed format and greater sensitivity to general aptitude versus specific cognitive skills (De Corte et al., 2001; Paris et al., 1984). Comprehension monitoring is, however, an important component of reciprocal teaching, which has been found to produce consistent and strong effects on reading comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Self-instruction is a form of comprehension monitoring where students self-verbalize strategies in order to guide ongoing reading comprehension. Studies by Miller (1985) and Elliot-Faust & Pressley (1986) show that elementary students can be successfully trained in a self-instruction routine and that self-instruction produces significant improvements in comprehension monitoring relative to comparison treatments, including treatments known to improve comprehension monitoring. Grade 4 average readers in Miller s study were trained to generate self-guiding statements for detecting inconsistencies in stories. Students trained in this manner demonstrated significantly greater error detection than students who received the same instructions for detecting inconsistencies, but were not trained to self-instruct. Grade 3 students in Elliot-Faust & Pressley s study were trained to compare content within an expository passage. 2

3 Results showed that improvements in active text processing, and comprehension monitoring were more enduring when students were trained to selfinstruct these comparisons. Collectively, there is good evidence to support the effectiveness of comprehension monitoring training with students across Grades 3 5 and with both narrative and expository text. Make Connections Making connections to background knowledge is centrally important to reading comprehension. According to the generative model of learning (Wittrock, 1974), understanding is constructed by making connections between the text and one s existing knowledge and experience and by building relationships among the ideas in a text. By extension, it might be expected that instructional approaches that help students to build these kinds of connections would improve reading comprehension. Numerous controlled experimental research studies confirm that instruction that helps students to activate background knowledge and build connections between background knowledge and ideas in a text is effective in this regard (Carr & Thompson, 1996; Hansen & Pearson, 1983; King, 1994; Linden & Wittrock, 1981). Activation of background knowledge was one of six research supported reading comprehension strategies identified in a review by Pressley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, and Kurita (1989). There are a variety of approaches for helping students to activate and utilize background knowledge, including asking students to reflect on and record their knowledge, engaging students in interactive discussion of prior knowledge in relation to the text, and involving students in asking and answering questions about the text that require prior knowledge. The research evidence that supports activating background knowledge as a reading comprehension strategy spans a variety of instructional approaches that involve doing so before, during, and/or after reading. Carr and Thompson (1996) showed that a relatively simple approach of explicitly prompting students to reflect on and express their prior knowledge before reading significantly improves inferential reading comprehension on unfamiliar passages when compared to no prompting. Participants included upper-elementary and middle school students with (Grade 5) and without (Grades 5 and 8) learning disabilities. Hansen and Pearson (1983) trained Grade 4 students identified as either poor or good readers on the importance of connecting to prior knowledge and engaged them in question-based discussions before and after reading that involved making connections to information beyond the text. Poor readers who were instructed using this approach demonstrated significantly greater inferential reading comprehension than poor readers who underwent basal reader instruction. Certain types of question generation can also help students to activate prior knowledge, and there is evidence that this form of question generation is particularly effective at improving reading comprehension. In a study by King (1994), students in Grades 4 and 5 underwent training and practice to ask and answer self-generated questions about the text in pairs. The students were trained to use either experience-based questions (making connections both within the text and between the text and prior knowledge and experience) or lesson-based questions (making connections only within the text). Students trained to use experiencebased questions outperformed students using lesson-based questions on literal and inferential comprehension questions presented immediately following the lesson and three days later. In some studies, a background knowledge strategy is one component of a multiple strategies approach. For example, in a study by Linden and Wittrock (1981), Grade 5 students underwent instruction that involved visualization, summarization, and the generation of metaphors and analogies involving the story and their own experiences. Their findings showed that such training can significantly increase student production of text-relevant associations images, summaries, metaphors, and analogies) and significantly strengthen reading comprehension relative to conventional instruction. The TWA approach (Think before reading, think While reading, think After reading) is another example of an effective multiple-strategies approach that incorporates background knowledge activation. The nine-step framework engages students not only in thinking about what they know before reading but also in linking to prior knowledge while reading, in addition to summarizing and comprehension monitoring. A study with Grade 5 struggling readers showed that this approach elicited significantly greater performance on five oral reading comprehension measures than did a reciprocal questioning approach (Mason, 2004). Together, these studies provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of instruction that facilitates making connections to background knowledge with elementary school students, regardless of whether the text is expository or narrative. Although there is evidence for effectiveness across ability levels, 3

4 some studies suggest that this type of instruction may be more beneficial for poor readers than for good readers (Dewitz, Carr, & Patberg, 1987; Hansen & Pearson, 1983). Visualize One of the hypotheses investigated by reading comprehension researchers is that generating mental images that represent text content what is called mental imagery or visualization might improve reading performance by increasing the reader s metacognitive awareness and depth of text processing. While the spontaneous use of visualization is relatively infrequent in unskilled readers, its use increases significantly with training (Gambrell & Bales, 1986). Research studies have confirmed that training readers to visualize in order to understand and remember the text has a beneficial impact on reading outcomes. The most well-established effect of visualization training is that readers remember more of what they read. This is a consistent and reliable effect, as documented by the National Reading Panel (2000) in its rigorous review of 20 years of reading comprehension research. The Panel identified seven experimental, controlled investigations of visualization training that met its stringent review criteria and concluded on the basis of these studies that mental imagery reliably improves memory of text. Both simple instruction to create mental images of what is read and visualization training can significantly improve the recall of story content (including the number of propositions and story structure elements) relative to just trying to remember the text (Gambrell & Jawitz, 1993; Pressley, 1976). Another means to help students visualize a story is storyboarding, which has also been found to increase free recall (Rubman & Waters, 2000). The effect of visualization on recall is particularly strong when students are also instructed to attend to illustrations in the text (Gambrell & Jawitz, 1993). The benefits of visualization may even extend beyond recall of the text. A study by Borduin, Borduin, and Manley (1994) demonstrated that Grade 2 readers trained to visualize text passages performed at a significantly higher level on a later test of inferential passage comprehension than students provided with no training. Moreover, their performance was as good as students who engaged in a directed reading group discussion with corrective feedback. Grade 5 students in a study by Linden and Wittrock (1981) were instructed in several strategies, including making images in their mind as they read the text and drawing these images after reading. Their post-test reading comprehension was significantly higher than that of students who engaged in conventional reading instruction. Findings by Gambrell and Bales (1986) suggest that visualization training can also significantly improve students self-monitoring of comprehension, which itself is associated with improved reading comprehension. Belowaverage readers in Grades 4 and 5 trained to visualize to understand and remember the text detected significantly more explicit and implicit inconsistencies in text passages than did students trained to do whatever you can to understand and remember the text. Another study consistent with these findings showed that Grade 6 students who engaged in storyboarding between reading and rereading sessions also demonstrated better detection of inconsistencies in the text than peers who read and reread without storyboarding (Rubman & Waters, 2000). The beneficial effects of visualization have been documented across the elementary grades, which include students below-grade level, on-grade level, and above-grade level (Borduin et al., 1994; Gambrell & Bales, 1986; Gambrell & Jawitz, 1993; Linden & Wittrock, 1981; Rubman & Waters, 2000). Ask Questions The rationale for training students to ask questions about the text is that this strategy may encourage more active processing as well as comprehension monitoring (Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). Rosenshine, Meister, and Chapman (1996) reviewed 26 controlled experimental studies where students were taught to generate questions during or after listening to or reading a passage. Their analysis revealed an overall large effect on student performance during experimenter-developed comprehension tests and summarization tests. In comparison, the effect of question asking on standardized tests of reading comprehension was small. The National Reading Panel (2000) determined that among various approaches to teaching reading comprehension, there was strongest scientific evidence for the effectiveness of question asking in improving reading comprehension. The Panel noted its beneficial effects on memory, answering questions based on the text, and summarizing. However, they, too, found less robust effects on standardized comprehension tests an indication that the improvements may not generalize to all assessment contexts. Asking questions may also improve students self-monitoring of comprehension. Davey and McBride (1986) found that students who underwent instruction and practice in generating questions about what they read made significantly more 4

5 accurate predictions regarding their performance on passage comprehension tests than did students who received no training or merely received practice in questioning. Thus, asking questions may boost students metacognitive skill. Question generating is also a component of reciprocal teaching, a well-validated form of multiple strategies instruction, where students are trained through an apprenticeship-like interaction with the teacher and other students to question, predict, clarify, and summarize (National Reading Panel, 2000; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Rosenshine et al., 1996). Other forms of multiple comprehension strategy instruction that include question generating also produce beneficial effects on experimenter tests of reading comprehension (Johnson-Glenberg, 2005). Overall, asking questions appears to be a successful approach for students across a range of skill levels and grade levels. In Rosenshine and Meister s meta-analysis (1996), there were no consistent differences in the effectiveness of asking questions with respect to either of these variables. Asking questions does prove beneficial when working with expository or narrative text (Davey & McBride, 1986; Johnson-Glenberg, 2005; Taylor, Alber, & Walker, 2002). Infer and Predict Building connections between the text and personal and world knowledge is related to two additional reading strategies: inferring and predicting. By applying their own knowledge to a text, readers can make inferences about aspects of the text that are not fully explicit, and they can use these inferences to make predictions about the nature of the text to follow. As explained by Hansen (1981), generating inferences requires the integration of prior knowledge and information in the text the manipulation of text information thereby providing a potential mechanism for improving students text processing. Both strategies are understood to engage students in deeper text processing. Indeed, the recommendations of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow et al., 1999) for early reading instruction include direct instruction in prediction and generating inferences. Inferring and predicting have been researched both as separate and combined strategies. Activation of prior knowledge is commonly included in instruction of infer and predict strategies, because it is a limiting factor in their use. For example, Dole, Brown, and Trathen (1996) investigated the effects of strategy training that incorporated instruction in how, when, and why to activate prior knowledge and how to predict. Students in Grades 5 and 6 (high, high-average, average, low-average readers) who received the training demonstrated significantly better performance on comprehension questions than a comparison group that underwent instruction focused only on building and activating prior knowledge and a basal reader instruction control group. Likewise, in another study, students in Grade 2 (reading at- or above-grade level) who engaged in the activation of prior knowledge and prediction before guided reading outperformed a basal reader group on comprehension of stories used during instruction (Hansen, 1981). In this case, however, generalization to untrained content was poor. This same study showed that relative to basal reader instruction, extensive practice with inferential questions during guided reading significantly improved comprehension of instructional passages, inferential comprehension on untrained but familiar stories, and standardized reading comprehension. Dewitz, Carr, and Patberg (1987) investigated the effects of inference training involving a cloze procedure where Grade 5 students generated inferences to complete blanks in the text and answered inferential questions. The cloze group s performance on comprehension post-tests was significantly better than that of students who were given training to activate prior knowledge or students who performed supplemental work such as reading social studies magazines. Results also suggested that students trained in drawing inferences improved their understanding of their comprehension failures. Combined training in infer and predict has been found to produce impressive gains. Yuill and Oakhill (1988) provided students aged 7 8 years with practice and training in generating lexical inferences, accompanied by smaller numbers of question generation and prediction. Participants included skilled and less skilled comprehenders. The less skilled comprehenders who received strategy training in inferring and predicting made significantly greater gains on a standardized measure of reading comprehension than did less skilled comprehenders who engaged in standard comprehension exercises or rapid decoding training. The average improvement in months was for the strategy group, for the comprehension exercise group, and 6.00 for the decoding group. McGee and Johnson (2003) performed a parallel study with students aged 6 9 years and also found that less skilled readers improved significantly more following strategy training versus standard comprehension exercises; the gains were 20 and 10 months, respectively. These findings are also consistent with the results of a third study in which Grade 4 students were trained in the importance of relating text to prior knowledge and engaged 5

6 in a discussion of questions requiring inference generation and prediction (Hansen & Pearson, 1983). The poor readers that underwent this training outperformed poor readers who underwent basal reader instruction on inferential comprehension of the trained passages, on inferential and literal comprehension of a new story, and on inferential comprehension of a common story. Good readers in the strategy training group outperformed peers in the basal reader group only on inferential comprehension for the common story. Together, these studies suggest that inferring and predicting are highly effective strategies for less skilled readers, more so than for skilled readers. Hansen and Pearson suggest that skilled readers might also demonstrate improvement when more difficult reading materials are used (readers in their study used texts that were two levels below their reading grade level). Summarize Research shows that summarizing is a latedeveloping skill and is not mastered until high school. Poor summarizing skills are associated with poor knowledge of the important ideas in a text (Brown, Day, & Jones, 1983). Thus, the primary goal of summarization instruction is to develop students ability to identify main ideas a skill that requires prior knowledge, the ability to make inferences, and the ability to generalize (National Reading Panel, 2000). After reviewing the experimental research on comprehension strategy instruction, the National Reading Panel (2000) identified summarizing as one of eight procedures that have a firm scientific basis for improving reading comprehension. In fact, in its review of 18 controlled experimental studies, the Panel found no negative findings. These conclusions are consistent with those of Pressley and colleagues (1989), who identified summarization as a strategy with solid experimental research support for students in Grades 3 8. Direct instruction has been demonstrated as an effective approach for developing readers abilities to identify main ideas (paragraph- and passage-level) and their supporting details, which significantly improved the quality of the summaries (Baumann, 1984; Jitendra, Hoppes, & Xin, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley et al., 1989). Indeed, the improvement in main idea identification may transfer from one form of text to another, i.e., narrative to expository (Jitendra et al., 2000). Direct instruction in the use of text structure is also an effect approach for improving summarization (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987; Williams, 2005). Armbruster, Anderson, and Ostertag (1987) provided Grade 5 students with direct instruction in how to recognize and use a problem/solution structure for generating summaries. Relative to students who received traditional training centered on silent reading and question answering, these students demonstrated significantly better recall of the main points in the passage and wrote summaries that were significantly better organized and included significantly more of the most important ideas. Related to this approach is one that develops students use of typographical cues to text structure (headings and subheadings). Taylor (1982) demonstrated that the free recall of Grade 5 students (reading above-grade level or at- or above-grade level) trained to generate hierarchical summaries based on these structural features was significantly more complete and better organized than that of students receiving instruction that involved pre-reading activation of background knowledge, silent reading, and question answering and review although there was evidence for differences in student ability to master the strategy. A study by Rinehart, Stahl, and Erickson (1986) suggests that the benefits of summarization training may extend beyond improved main idea identification and quality of summaries. Grade 6 students were randomly selected to join one of two groups receiving either basal reader instruction or direct instruction focused on identification of main ideas and supporting details and deletion of unimportant or redundant information. On a study measure where students were given a passage to read, summarize, study, and answer questions about, students who received summarization instruction spent significantly more time studying, had significantly higher-quality notes, and recalled significantly more major pieces of information in their summaries. Further analysis suggested that the primary effect of the intervention was an increase in attention to higher-level (major) text information, which indirectly facilitated recall by virtue of an increase in study time. The studies described above support the effectiveness of summarization training for students in Grades 5 8. The NRP review identified additional studies supporting the use of summarization in Grades 2, 3, and 4. Summarization training appears to be a generally effective approach for students with a range of reading and ability levels (Armbruster et al., 1987; Baumann, 1984; Jitendra et al., 2000; Taylor, 1982). Conclusion Reading comprehension strategies help readers to interact with the text in a manner that successfully fosters understanding. The strategies identified 6

7 here are recommended by reading comprehension researchers (Ehren, 2005; Pressley et al., 1989), the National Reading Panel (2000), and the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow et al., 1999), the latter of which stated that explicit instruction of reading strategies should be a component of reading instruction throughout the early grades. Although there may be some differences in the effectiveness of individual strategies for different types of readers, there are effective strategies for all readers. There are a variety of effective ways to instruct the reading comprehension strategies reviewed here. Although the focus of this paper has been to outline research support for individual strategies, the aforementioned strategies are also components of multiple strategy instruction approaches or comprehension strategy packages (Pressley, 2001). For example, asking questions, summarizing, and predicting are all developed as part of reciprocal teaching instruction, a well-validated approach to multiple strategy instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Because good readers are able to implement reading strategies flexibly, instruction in multiple strategies may be particularly valuable. 7

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