Fostering Reading Comprehension Strategies in Young Children- Print and Online

      So here is the moment I have been waiting for... a chance to share my dissertation in a relevant and meaningful way with the people who have the power to make changes- teachers.  My goal is to relate my research of second-grade readers to the requirements of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

     The CCSS require that students in the younger grades be exposed to and receive instruction in strategies for reading informational text.  I found plenty of educational researchers that supported this move, rather than waiting until students were older like fourth grade.  Conversely, there are some other educational researchers that believe that children need to learn to read (focusing on decoding and fluency) before they can read to learn (focusing on comprehension strategies).  I fall into the former category because 10 years of experience in first grade clearly showed me that young children are very capable of using comprehension strategies. In particular, their interest in knowing more about their world such as dinosaurs, wolves, cars, etc. inspired beginning readers to even attempt reading, let alone read independently (the decodeable readers such as the Fat Cat Sat on the Mat did not lend themselves to student-created informative posters, pictures, or even blurbs for a Web site).  Informational text belongs in a primary grade classroom.

     In the interest of keeping this discussion briefer than my actual dissertation, I will move on to the more practical applications of my findings and how they relate to the Common Core.

     Last year I read with 4 second-grade students who were reading above the benchmark level based on a print-based informal reading inventory in January of the school year.  These students also showed basic Internet knowledge such as using a search engine, conducting key word searches, and maneuvering within a hypertext environment (scrolling, clicking on links, using the back button). Next, I asked all four students to locate information about endangered animals in a book, on a closed hypertext Web site, and through open Internet searches.  They were asked why the topics of the texts were endangered and then I recorded them think aloud while they found the information.  After transcribing their think-alouds I looked for which reading comprehension strategies they used. This was compared within reading contexts, across reading contexts, and across readers.  I used the previous research of Julie Coiro as a guide when analyzing my data. A comprehensive list of strategies were found to be used by the second graders.

     Since writing the dissertation, the CCSS are implemented all over the country and administrators and teachers are seeking information on how to best lift our students' abilities to match these rigorous standards.  Available on the Common Core site is a great chart of how the standards spiral as students progress through the grades. Below are the informational text standards for K-3. I include 3rd grade because it is always important to know where instruction is headed as instruction becomes for complex and sophisticated.

If we break down this list and compare to the comprehensive list of strategies used in my dissertation, the strategies that the CCSS are asking our students to use are:

• Determining Importance

• Inferring/Connecting

• Integrating/Elaborating

• Evaluating

• Monitoring

• Questioning

• Searching

      Delving deeper, although there are some similarities in strategy use with print vs. online text, there are some key differences.  These differences center around what researchers Afflerbach and Cho (2008) call "realizing and constructing potential texts to read."  This is best illustrated by asking people to think about what they would do to find the answer to a question in a print book while at the library.  If I put a book in front of you, asked you a question, and told you to find the answer in this book, you would most likely look at the table of contents, index, headings, etc. to narrow down a place to look in the text.  You might be pretty confident that the information is located in the book somewhere and that the information contained in the book in entirely true.  Now think about if I asked you to look up the answer to a question using open Internet searching.  What would you have to do then?  Where do you go?  How do retrieve the relevant information?  Who do you trust to provide valid information?
     Essentially, your process will be different because you need to construct the potential of texts to read first before you can read a Web site for an answer.  You will need to think of the essential ideas and then come up with relevant search terms.  Changing the wording of your search terms by using synonyms may yield better results.  Once the search results with Web sites are returned to you, you will next have to make a decision about which Web sites are more pertinent to your goal than others.  How do you judge this? Do you look at the Web site title, the URL, or the short blurb under the link?  Which Web site can you trust that the information is accurate and up to date?  
    Once you are in the Web site there are further considerations for where to read.  The Web site may have a navigation bar that leads to hidden pages.  Like a book's table of contents, you need to make predictions about where to go to find the answer to your question; however, unlike a book you cannot flip through the pages first to judge relevance.  You need to click on the link and then decide if the page was a good choice. Did we mention that if you click on hyperlinks embedded in the text you may end up reading a totally different Web site?  Phew!  There is a lot to consider here as you now try to figure out how to repair your reading path back to that original spot.  The World Wide Web is really a spider web of information!

    That being said, how do we teach our primary-age students the essential skills to be able to successfully find information in print and online text?



Stay tuned for more specifics in future posts.