“The first research showed that background knowledge plays a role,” said Kausalai Wijakumar, a professor of education at the University of Texas A&M, who has been studying reading instructions and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand faster.”
For some children, particularly children from rich families, he said, the knowledge of the background is “enough” to unlock reading understanding, but not for everyone. “If we want all children to read, we have shown that they can be taught with the right strategies,” Wijekumar said. She has a research body to support her position.
Wijekumar agrees that drilling students at the main point or the purpose of the author is not useful because a reader in difficulties cannot find a point or purpose from the air. (Nor is he a fan of highlighting keywords or graphic organizers, both common strategies for understanding reading in schools). Instead, Wijakumar defends a step -by -step process, conceived in the 1970s for his mentor and research partner, Bonnie JF Meyer, Professor Emerita in Penn State.
The first step is to guide students through a series of questions while reading, like “Is there any problem?” “What caused it?” And “Is there a solution?” According to their answers, students can decide what structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Next, the students complete the blank spaces, as in a working sheet of Mad Libs, to help create a main idea statement. And finally, they practice expanding that idea with relevant details to form a summary.
Wijekumar analyzed Cinderella’s story for me, using her approach. The problem? Cinderella is intimidated by its stepmother and stepsisters. We learn this because you are forced to do additional tasks and you are not allowed to attend the ball. The cause of the problem? They are jealous of her. That is why they take his beautiful clothes. Finally, the solution: a fairy godmother helps Cinderella go to the ball and meet the blue prince. Then, students can build all these elements to come with the main idea: Cinderella is intimidated by its stepmother and the site of stepsis, they are jealous of it, but a fairy godmother saves her.
It is a formula approach and there are certainly other ways to see or express the main idea. I would not have analyzed Cinderella that way. I would have guessed that it is a story about never giving up your dreams, even if your life is miserable now. But Wijekumar says it is a useful beginning for students who fight most.
“It is very structured and systematic, and that provides a solid base,” Wijkumar said. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and overlap more things, but 99 percent of children have difficulty starting.”
Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called STIS, which means intelligent tutoring using the structure strategy. Around 200,000 students worldwide use their. The non -profit organization of Wijekumar, LiteracyIt takes on schools $ 40 per student plus teachers training, which can cost $ 800 per teacher, depending on the size of the school.
The tutor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. He was one of the only Three online learning technologies This demonstrated clear evidence to improve student performance, according to a February 2021 report from the Institute of Education Sciences, the Research and Development Arm of the United States Department of Education.
Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine its reading program and testing it with more students. Your most recent study, A large -scale replication in high poverty schoolsIt was very successful according to a criterion, but not so successful, according to another measure. It was published last year at the Journal of Educational Psychology.
A team of six researchers led by Wijakumar randomized 17 or 33 schools in the NORT sheet and throughout the Texas border to teach reading with theirs, while the 16 traninal schools taught reading as usual. More than 1,200 fifth grade students practiced their reading comprehension using for 45 minutes a week about six months. His teachers received 16 hours of training on how to teach reading comprehension in this way and also delivered traditional analog reading lessons to their students.
After six months, the students who received this reading instruction published significantly higher scores in an evaluation designed by the researcher, who measured the students’ ability to write main ideas, remember key information and understand text structures. However, there was no statistically significant differentiation between the two groups in a standardized test, the gray silent reading test (GSRT), which measured the general reading comprehension of the students. The researchers did not report the state test scores.
Previous studies With richer students He showed improvements In the standardized reading comprehension test. It is difficult to make sense to why the study showed that giant benefits use a measure, but none uses another.
Substantial changes in instruction for high thesis poverty students were needed. Some were readers so weak that the Wijakumar team had to write easier texts so that students could practice the method. But the greatest change was 14 hours of additional training for teachers and the creation of instructional guides for teachers. Wijakumar strategies directly contradicted what the textbooks of their schools told them to do. At first, the students were confused with the teachers who taught them in one way and another. Then Weekumar worked with the teachers to eliminate their textbook instructions and teach him in his own way.
I consulted with Marissa Filderman, a respected reading expert who has He reviewed the literature on understanding instruction for children who fight With reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. He said that despite the imperfect evidence of this study, he sees Wijkumar’s research body as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important together with the creation of knowledge and background vocabulary. But it is still an evolving science, and research is not yet clear enough to guide teachers about how long to spend in each aspect.
Improving the understanding of reading is fundamental, and I will be looking for new research to help answer these questions to teachers.
Shirley Liu contributed reports.
This story about Teaching the main idea It was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger reportA non -profit independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Enroll in Test points and others Hechinger newsletters.
