What happens to reading comprehension when children focus on their main ideas

“Early research has shown that background knowledge plays a role,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand faster.”

For some children, especially those from wealthy families, background knowledge is enough to unlock reading comprehension, but not for everyone. “If we want all the kids to read, we have proven that they can teach with the right strategy,” Wijekumar said. She has a lot of research to support her position.

Wijekumar agrees that drilling students on the purpose of points or authors will not help, as struggling readers cannot propose a point or purpose in thin air. (She also doesn’t like highlighting keywords or graphic organizers, a common strategy for school reading comprehension.) Instead, Wijekumar advocates advocate for a step-by-step process, her mentor and research partner Bonnie JF Meyer, Professor Emeritus of Pennsylvania, conceived in the 1970s.

The first step is to guide students to read a series of questions such as “Is there a problem?” “What causes it?” and “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students can decide on the following paragraphs: Causes and effects, questions and solutions, comparisons or sequences. Next, students fill in the blanks (as in the crazy Libs worksheet) to help create a major idea statement. Finally, they expanded the idea through relevant details to form the summary.

Wijekumar used her method to analyze the Cinderella story for me. question? Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepmother. We learned this because she was forced to do extra chores and was not allowed to participate in the ball. The cause of the problem? They were jealous of her. That’s why they took off her pretty clothes. Finally, the solution: A fairy godmother helps Cinderella get the ball and meet the Prince Charming. Students can then put all these elements together to come up with the main idea: Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepmother because they are jealous of her, but a fairy godmother saves her.

This is a formulaic approach, and of course there are other ways to observe or express the main ideas. I won’t analyze Cinderella that way. I would guess it is a story about never giving up your dreams even if your life becomes painful. But Wijekumar said it is a useful start for the most struggling students.

“It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a solid foundation for the foundation,” Wijekumar said. “It’s just the starting point. You can put it into practice and layer it in more ways, but 99% of the kids are just starting out with difficulty.”

Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computer teacher called ITSS, which represents the use of structural strategies for intelligent tutoring. About 200,000 students around the world use ITS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, Linacy.io, charges schools $40 for student and teacher training, and based on school size, each teacher’s training is $800.

The instructor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. According to a report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Research and Development Division, ITS is one of only three online learning technologies that demonstrate clear evidence of improving student achievement.

Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine her reading plan and conduct tests with more students. Her recent research is a large-scale replication in high-poverty schools, based on another code, but not so successful. It was published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

The six researchers led by Wijekumar were randomly assigned 17 schools from six Northeast 33 schools to read along the Texas border with ITS professors, while the remaining 16 schools read as usual. More than 1,200 fifth-grade students used ITS for 45 minutes of reading comprehension within six months. Their teachers received 16 hours of training on how to teach reading comprehension this way, and also provided students with traditional simulated reading courses.

Six months later, students who received this reading guidance scored significantly higher on the assessment designed by the researcher, which measured students’ ability to write key ideas, recall key information, and understand text structures. However, in the standardized test (Grey Silent Reading Test (GSRT)), there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups, which measured students’ general reading comprehension. Researchers did not report state test scores.

Early research with wealthy students shows improvements in standardized reading comprehension tests. It is difficult to understand why this study showed great benefits using one measure without one method.

These high-poverty students need to undergo substantial changes. Some are such a weak reader, and Wijekumar’s team must draft simpler text so that students can practice the method. But the biggest change is 14 hours of additional teacher training and creating instructional guides for teachers. Wijekumar’s strategy directly contradicts what school textbooks tell them to do. At first, students were confused with teachers to teach their teachers one way and another. So, Wijekumar worked with the teacher to delete their textbook instructions and teach her how.

I consulted Marissa Filmerman, a respected reading expert who reviewed literature on teaching understanding of children who struggle with reading and was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. She said that despite the imperfect evidence for the study, she believes that Wijekumar’s research system is important evidence for clear strategic guidance along with architectural background knowledge and vocabulary. But it is still an evolving science, and the research is not clear enough to instructors how much time they spend on each aspect.

Improving reading comprehension is crucial and I will focus on new research to help teachers answer these questions.

Shirley Liu contributed the report.

This About Teach the main ideas Written by Jill Barshay by Hechinger Reporta nonprofit, independent news organization focuses on inequality and innovation in education. register Proof point There are others Hechinger Communications.