Reading comprehension: From research to practice in middle-grades English language arts
This article shares the details of a successful collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education faculty member Leigh Hall and eighth-grade teacher Deanna Watts on a research project that greatly improved students' reading comprehension.
Deanna Watts teaches eighth-grade English language arts in Orange County, North Carolina. (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)
University of North Carolina School of Education faculty member Leigh Hall researches reading development among middle school students. (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)
Learn more
Related pages
- "Twas the Night Before Christmas": Retelling through thinking maps: After reading and discussing “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” students will work together to create a Flow Map. Each student will then use the map they created individually to retell the story in his/her own words.
- Staging history: Charter School Teacher of the Year John Hall brings lessons to life: This article shares some of the instructional strategies of John Hall, 2009-10 AT&T Charter School’s Teacher of the Year. Mr. Hall brings social studies lessons to life by incorporating drama and art.
- Preparing English language learners for reading comprehension: Use KWL charts, circle maps and brainstorming webs, and concept maps to prepare English language learners, content-area learners, and all students for reading comprehension.
Related topics
- Learn more about comprehension, language arts, reading, teacher profiles, and teaching methods.
Legal
The text of this page is copyright ©2010. See terms of use. Images and other media may be licensed separately; see captions for more information and read the fine print.
During the 2009-10 school year, Orange County, NC, eighth-grade language arts teacher Ms. Deanna Watts collaborated with University of North Carolina School of Education faculty member Dr. Leigh Hall on a classroom research project based on Dr. Hall’s academic theories about reading development among middle school students. According to Ms. Watts,
- the project took very little class time,
- its elements were easily integrated into her everyday classroom routine,
- neither she nor her students needed to use any new technology, and
- over the span of the eight-month exercise,
- all of her students’ reading comprehension and vocabulary skills improved measurably, and
- a significant percentage of her students gained two full grade levels of reading progress.
The project
Ms. Watts first met Dr. Hall in 2006, when Ms. Watts was earning her master’s degree in Chapel Hill. Three years later, when Dr. Hall was ready to submit her theories to real-world tests with real-live students, she met Dr. Hall again, at Dr. Hall’s recruiting presentation at A.L Stanback Middle School, where Ms. Watts teaches. Ms. Watts understood the project would relate to Dr. Hall’s research, which focuses on “how students’ literate academic identities are developed” but wasn’t familiar with Dr. Hall’s methods or goals.1
In layman’s terms, Dr. Hall contends that most students want to read well but many factors, including how they think of themselves as readers and how their peers and teachers treat them with regard to their reading, prevent them from improving.
Impressed by Dr. Hall’s presentation, Ms. Watts agreed to participate in the proposed project, which had two primary objectives:
- to prompt students to think more about reading — i.e., how they read, what it means to read, the value of reading, how they might improve their reading, etc., and
- to demonstrate to students that reading relates authentically to everything else in their lives.
First component
During the first week of class, Ms. Watts asked her students to complete a survey written by Dr. Hall that includes questions like “How would you describe yourself as a reader?” and “If someone told you that you were a good reader what would this mean to you?” [See questionnaire here in PDF format.] The students completed this survey twice again — halfway through and at the end of the project — and completed an abbreviated version numerous times over duration of the project.
Based on the students’ written answers, Ms. Watts and Dr. Hall suggested strategies the children might employ to reach their stated goals, and created small, student-moderated study groups that focused less on text issues — e.g., what the characters in the story did; what type of symbolism the author used — than on reading issues. At first, Ms. Watts explains, the students talked about pronunciation, vocabulary, reading speed, etc. Over time, though, with encouragement from her and Dr. Hall, they began exploring the dimensions of comprehension.
Says Ms. Watts, “They grumbled after about the fourth time they explained, in writing, ‘This is where I was with my reading; this is where I am now; this is where I want to be; and this is how I might get there,’ but, generally, they cooperated.”
Improvement came slowly, Ms. Watts reports. “Halfway through the project we saw only slight changes, then, near the end, extraordinary results.” She ascribes much of this cumulative improvement to another classroom technique she and Dr. Hall employed consistently: pointedly and repeatedly calling students’ attention to reading issues, regardless of the formal lesson of the moment. Ms. Watts and Dr. Hall reminded the students throughout the school day, at every appropriate opportunity, that although everyone reads differently in different situations, the same comprehension skills apply.
Second component
“Any middle school teacher will tell you kids at this age are all about ‘what’s real,’” Ms. Watts emphasizes. “If they don’t believe their lessons have a valid connection to their daily lives, they’ll let you know immediately. I believe the success of this project owes much to the fact that the kids ‘got it’ at this level.”
The strategy Ms. Watts and Dr. Hall developed together to accomplish this goal involved challenging the children to discover what reading means — or, rather, what it means to be a reader — at home, in church, at the mall, online, etc. Over the span of approximately one month, the students interviewed others about reading; observed how, when, and where others read in public; and noted the many everyday instances when they, themselves, read outside school.
Somewhat to Ms. Watts’ surprise, the students embraced the exercise enthusiastically. “They enjoyed playing journalist and ’stalking’ other people,” she reports. She’s also surprised at how effectively the exercise compelled the students to understand — in ways that never occurred to them before — that reading is integral to nearly everything anyone does. “It helped make everything Leigh and I said about reading ‘real’ to them.”
The researcher and the research
Leigh Hall earned her master’s degree before entering the classroom, where, like many other teachers, she realized that education theory doesn’t always translate into effective teaching and learning. Many of her sixth-grade students had trouble reading but too often her sincere attempts to help them failed.
True to her academic training, she visited a university library to discover what the latest studies could tell her. She found a reasonable amount of reading research geared to elementary school students but not much about middle-schoolers, a fair number of items about students with individualized education plans, and more than she expected about students who are unmotivated to learn.
In a sense, her career in formal education research began that day, when she realized there were perhaps millions of adolescents without “exceptionalities” who needed help but to whom few researchers paid attention. She came away from the library, “determined to understand what it’s like to be a middle school kid marked as a struggling reader. I wanted to see the world as that kid sees it.”
A momentous revelation
Few academicians are willing to make unequivocal statements. Dr. Hall, though, does not hesitate to say, out loud, to anyone at any time, “Everybody wants to be able to read.” Students, she admits, may be unmotivated to learn certain subjects, like mathematics, and may refuse to read certain books, like social studies texts, but no one, she insists, does not want to know how to read.
“It took me three or four years of teaching, observing, and listening to come to this conclusion,” she says, “but when I finally did, my ability to help kids improved tremendously.”
Her revelation also prompted her to leave the classroom and return to academia to untangle the following enigma: “On the one hand, I never met a student who didn’t want to read, and on the other, I never met a teacher who didn’t want to help students learn to read. Both desire the same thing. It’s not an adversarial relationship.”
Literate academic identities
Dr. Hall’s research supports the following propositions:
- students who do not read well don’t like their positions with respect to their classmates,
- many are unsure how to change this situation,
- for some there’s a social risk in trying to change, and
- many believe the odds of improvement are so low they’re unwilling to make an effort to improve.
The best way to help students, Dr. Hall believes, is for teachers to talk to them individually about their reading, establish a rapport, and encourage them to express how they see themselves as readers. Dr. Hall took this personal approach with a number of the students in Ms. Watts’ class. Without exception, these “focal” students responded positively. Unfortunately, she concedes, few teachers have time to pay individual attention to every child, and even the ones who try can’t always reach reticent students.
An alternative, efficient way to acquire information about how affective behaviors influence student achievement is to employ a survey instrument. The one most useful to Dr. Hall — and which is the basis for the questionnaire she used in Ms. Watts’ class — is the Reader Self-Perception Scale (RSPS) developed by William Henk and Steven A. Melnick.2 Over the past fifteen years, this tool has been extensively normed and produces data useful to both educators and students.
A consistent and fascinating result produced by such surveys, Dr. Hall reports — and verified, incidentally, in Ms. Watts’ class — is the percentage of students who misperceive their abilities. It’s not uncommon, says Dr. Hall, for the personal observations of as many as 65 percent of students to fail to match their abilities as demonstrated by other assessments such as standardized tests. Nor, she emphasizes, are the discrepancies only among students who read below grade level. Students who rate themselves as “average” or “above average” are at least as likely to score outside those ranges — at both ends of the scale — as those who rate themselves “below average.”3
What’s “good”? What’s “bad”?
The persistence of these perception discrepancies, along with other elements of general education research and Dr. Hall’s own inquiries, have convinced Dr. Hall that labels like “good reader” and “poor reader” are beyond misleading; they are actively destructive to the education process.
For example, Dr. Hall tells the story of a sixth-grade girl she interviewed in Michigan, who scored well on standardized tests by employing a technique known as “word calling.” The girl’s trick, which she blithely explained to Dr. Hall, was to scan the test question for key words, find those words in the text, and, for her answer, copy the sentence that contained those words. More often than not, her answer was judged correct. “And the sad part,” says Dr. Hall, “is she knew she wasn’t really reading.”
On the other side of this conceptual coin, Dr. Hall explains, students who perceive themselves as poor readers frequently assume that “good” readers understand everything they read as soon as they read it. For these students, becoming a “good reader” appears impossible. “And the sad part is, they’re right,” says Dr. Hall, “not because there’s anything wrong with them but rather because everybody experiences misunderstandings at some point.”
One method for mitigating both types of tragedies, says Dr. Hall, is for teachers
- to form study groups comprising students who perceive themselves as poor readers and students who perceive themselves as good readers without mentioning — or even alluding to — the students’ relative reading abilities as demonstrated by standardized tests, and
- to conduct these groups as the study groups were conducted in the A.L. Stanback project, with a focus on reading rather than text issues.
An important benefit of this arrangement is that at some point during his or her reading, nearly every member of every group will admit to losing concentration or the text’s narrative thread. When this happens, Ms. Watts and Dr. Hall agree, significant learning begins. For example, students who perceive themselves as poor readers suddenly understand the difficulties they experience are not unique to them but are common to everyone, and thus feel empowered to join the conversation as equals with students they think of as “good readers.”
Ms. Watts reports being both surprised and gratified that, by the end of the A.L. Stanback project, most of the study groups were being led by students she privately considered to be struggling readers.
Most significantly, though, Ms. Watts and Dr. Hall agree, students in these groups
- benefited greatly from learning from each other,
- gained a deeper understanding of the reading improvement strategies suggested by their teachers,
- demonstrated a willingness to employ such strategies, and, most significantly
- came to understand comprehension as the true goal of reading.
Collateral developments
According to Ms. Watts, the A.L. Stanback project produced a number of positive results that will not appear in Dr. Hall’s research reports. First, she says, other teachers in other classes saw performance improvements in the students who participated in the project. “We had kids who received ‘F’s last year who suddenly starting passing classes. We had kids who rarely spoke up in class suddenly unafraid to ask questions. We had kids taking control of their own learning who never before understood the concept of self-guided learning.”
She mentions the name of a girl who, early in the year, had been temporarily removed from her regular class but “became a ’star’ and told me she was determined to be the first person in her family to earn a college degree”; and the name of a boy who, early in the year, read at barely a third-grade level but, “learned that others, too, struggled with reading comprehension and began sharing unique and insightful ideas he previously kept to himself.” These intellectual strides, says Ms. Watts, “boosted his confidence as a student in general.”
Another unanticipated benefit involved the students’ written responses to the open-ended questions contained in Dr. Hall’s questionnaire. “We asked them to write about their feelings with regard to reading,” says Ms. Watts, “but some also wrote about their feelings with regard to other aspects of their lives.” Some of these confessions, she notes, led to “other interventions.”
The bottom line
“I would definitely recommend Dr. Hall’s methods to other teachers,” says Ms. Watts. “The program isn’t a ‘time hog,’ it’s easily incorporated into the curriculum, and it produces wonderful results.” Even teachers who do not adopt every aspect of the project, she continues, will benefit from discovering at the beginning of the year, via an initial assessment, how students think of themselves as readers. “I am constantly amazed what you can learn from students if you take the time to ask them. This simple action is incredibly empowering for both the teacher and the student.”
Asked to suggest one word to describe her experience with Dr. Hall and her methods, Ms. Watts replies, “Awesome.”
Ms. Watts is willing to speak or correspond with educators about the A.L. Stanback project. Contact her via email.
Dr. Hall is willing to speak or correspond with educators about either her research or the A.L Stanback project. Contact her via email.
