Inquiry

Inquiry 2016

TERM 2

Notes from Research Readings:


Reading at Risk: Why Effective Literacy Practice is Not Effective
Waikato Journal of Education 15, Issue 3: 2010

By Sheilpa Patel
Faculty of Education
The University of Waikato


Key Research Notes:
  • The gap in New Zealand between high and low readers is very wide compared to other countries.
  • “...Kenneth Goodman’s (1976) explanation of the reading process where readers make the best guesses possible by using the fewest possible cues available to them including sampling, predicting, guessing and confirming unknown words in the process of reading.”
  • New Zealand Reading Practices: reading to children, language experience, shared reading, guided reading and independent reading.
  • “Teachers tend to stay away from teaching phonological and word level skills systematically, and instead lean towards teaching reading through meaningful contexts.”
  • “Taking a meaning-driven approach to reading, the Ministry of Education (2003) rejects sounding out as a processing strategy.”
  • New Zealand’s whole language instruction approach may not cater to diverse backgrounds because they enter school with fewer concepts about print, phonological awareness, and knowledge of letter-name correspondences.
  • Evidence suggests that recognising words as whole pieces of language may not support lower readers. Example: improvements with Jen through consolidating blend, digraph and word chunk sounds-She always refers to this to help her work out words.
  • Of a control group of 63 students with the same criteria as a group of 80 who had modified instruction, “Tunmar et al (2002). found that supplementing instruction with materials and skills in phonological awareness and alphabet coding resulted in the modified group of children achieving an average of 14 months higher than the children in the control group by the end of year 2.”
  • The gap between Maori and Pakeha students had closed by the end of year 2.
  • These results began to decline after reaching Year 4 reading level.

Conclusions:
  • Lower achievers may benefit more from explicit teaching of phonological skills and alphabet coding.
  • This style of instruction may benefit Maori and Pakeha students.
  • These results are effective until a child reaches the reading age of a year 4 reader.
  • Skills-orientated based approach is effective.

Effective Literacy Practice

Phonemic Awareness
  • Gaps in phonemic awareness impacts on spelling and writing too.
  • Phonemic awareness improves reading comprehension.
The Alphabetic Principle
  • All alphabet-sound relationships need to be consolidated before decoding can improve vastly.
Word Recognition, Automaticity and Fluency
  • “The more effort required to decode a word, the less capacity that is left over to comprehend it and the larger messages in the text” (Pressley, 2006, p. 321).
  • Decoding practice is necessary to improve automaticity.
  • “Fluent readers build up a word bank that allows them to automatically recognise approximately 85 percent of the words they encounter regularly, allowing them to concentrate on reading texts for comprehension” (Graves et al., 2004; Samuels, 2002).
Vocabulary Development
  • The missing link between decoding and comprehension is vocabulary.
  • Explicit vocabulary instruction is essential.
  • An explicit vocabulary instruction programme is beneficial.
Reading Comprehension and Strategies
  • Weak decoding and word recognition skills with gaps may limit reading progress. These concepts may need to be revisited for students to improve.
  • “One key comprehension strategy is teaching students to actively relate the ideas they read in texts to their own personal experiences and world knowledge, making the text more relevant to their lives” (Dymock & Nicholson, 2007; Graves, Watts-Taffe, & Graves, 1999; Pressley, 2006; Snow et al., 1998).
  • This allows the reader to weave new learning into existing frameworks in order for them to comprehend.
  • Explicit strategy instruction with opportunities to practise.
  • Students can better comprehend the text if they are taught question asking and answering strategies.


We could look into this vocabulary resource?
http://www.elciss.com/elciss-introduction/intro-vocabulary-intervention-programme.php


Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge - Of Words and the World
Scientific Insights into the Fourth-Grade Slump and the Nation's Stagnant Comprehension Scores

Red = My opinion about what is written
Black = quotes from the article

Research has found that lower income families struggle more with reading as they get older potentially due to being exposed to more incidental learning of words outside of the classroom.

We’re finding that even though the vast majority of our youngest readers can manage simple texts, many students—particularly those from low-income families—struggle when it comes time in grade four to tackle more advanced academic texts.

Breadth of vocabulary increases comprehension and facilitates further learning

Lower level students, particularly as they get older, learn from the world around them.  It’s important as teachers that we build on their prior knowledge and help to develop that of those lower level readers.
Most vocabulary growth results incidentally, from massive immersion in the world of language and knowledge. Systematically Build Word and World Knowledge

While word knowledge speeds up word recognition and thus the process of reading, world knowledge speeds up comprehension of textual meaning by offering a foundation for making inferences.4

If decoding does not happen quickly, the decoded material will be forgotten before it is understood.

One way we overcome this limitation of working memory while reading is by learning how to make a rapid, automatic deployment of underlying reading processes so that they become fast and unconscious, leaving the conscious mind (i.e., the working memory) free to think about what a text means.

Decoding fluency is achieved through accurate initial instruction followed by lots of practice.
Encourage students to read at home (practice) is important

Such general language fluency is also intimately connected with well-practiced vocabulary knowledge, meaning how familiar the words and their various connotations are to the student.

A big difference between an expert and a novice reader is the ability to take in basic features very fast, thereby leaving the mind free to concentrate on important features.

Finally, fluency is also increased by domain knowledge, which allows the reader to make rapid connections between new and previously learned content; this both eases and deepens comprehension.

Vocabulary knowledge correlates strongly with reading (and oral) comprehension.

In vocabulary acquisition, a small early advantage grows into a much bigger one unless we intervene very intelligently to help the disadvantaged student learn words at an accelerated rate. Early intervention in helping to develop student vocabulary is important to ensure that the gap in their reading ability is not increased as they get older.

A well educated 12th-grader knows an enormous number of words, mostly learned incidentally. But, there is also an important place for explicit vocabulary development, especially in the early years, and especially for children who are behind.

Include a range of learning techniques and activities for students in your reading programme (insert below) Such knowledge could be conveyed through read-alouds, well-conceived vocabulary instruction, and a variety of cumulative activities that immerse children in word and world knowledge.

Oral comprehension generally needs to be developed in our youngest students if we want them to be good readers.

Don’t Spend Excessive Time Teaching Formal Comprehension Skills. After a quick initial bump, there’s a plateau or ceiling in the positive effects, and little further benefit is derived.

The point of a comprehension strategy is to activate the student’s relevant knowledge. That’s great, but if the relevant prior knowledge is lacking, conscious comprehension strategies cannot activate it. Important to activate prior knowledge and if this is poor activities such as language experience may be beneficial

Making good use of school time is the single most egalitarian function the schools perform, because for disadvantaged children, school time is the only academic learning time, whereas advantaged students can learn a lot outside of school.

World knowledge is an essential component of reading comprehension, because every text takes for granted the readers’ familiarity with a whole range of unspoken and unwritten facts about the cultural and natural worlds.



What research has to say about Reading instruction - 2002
Nell K. Duke and P. David Pearson

These are some things that good readers do which I need to be reminded of. Other things not included are thing I am already doing:

  • Good readers are active readers
  • From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading. They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it, is meeting their goals.
  • When reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting and characters.
  • When reading expository text, these readers frequently construct and revise summaries of what they have read.
  • Comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity, but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive

Can we teach students to engage in these productive behaviors?

By this we mean that good comprehension instruction includes both explicit instruction in specific comprehension strategies and a great deal of time and opportunity for actual reading, writing, and discussion of text.

It is not enough just to offer good instruction. Several important features of good reading instruction also need to be present.
  • A great deal of time spent actually reading.
  • Experience reading real texts for real reasons.
  • Experience reading the range of text genres that we wish students to comprehend.
  • An environment rich in vocabulary and concept development through reading, experience, and, above all, discussion of words and their meanings.
  • Substantial facility in the accurate and automatic decoding of words.
  • Lots of time spent writing texts for others to comprehend.
  • An environment rich in high-quality talk about text


A Model of Comprehension Instruction
  • An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should be used.
  • Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action.
  • Collaborative use of the strategy in action
  • Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility.
  • Independent use of the strategy

Summary of the six individual comprehension strategies.
To summarize, we have identified six individual comprehension strategies that research suggests are beneficial to teach to developing readers: prediction/prior knowledge, think-aloud, text structure, visual representations, summarization, and questions/questioning.

Effective Comprehension Routines
Reciprocal teaching - reciprocal teaching involves a gradual release of responsibility from teacher to student for carrying out each part of the routine.
A typical reciprocal teaching session begins with a review of the main points from the previous session’s reading, or if the reading is new, predictions about the text based on the title and perhaps other information. Following this, all students read the first paragraph of the text silently to themselves. A student assigned to act as teacher then (a) asks a question about the paragraph, (b) summarizes the paragraph, (c) asks for clarification if needed, and (d) predicts what might be in the next paragraph. During the process, the teacher prompts the student/teacher as needed, and at the end provides feedback about the student/teacher’s work.

• Will we ask questions about the optimal numbers and kinds of comprehension strategies to teach? As noted throughout this chapter, we now know of a number of effective strategies, but we also suspect that there is a point of diminishing returns. If two well-taught, well-learned strategies are better than one, are three better than two, four better than three, and so on? Again, the field could continue to focus on developing additional effective strategies, but perhaps our attention is better focused on refining and prioritizing the strategies we already have.

Figure 10.6. A checklist for assessing the comprehension environment and instruction in the classroom
About the overall reading program
• How much time do students spend actually reading?
• How much reading do students routinely do in texts other than those written solely for reading or content area instruction?
• Do students have clear and compelling purposes in mind when reading?
• How many different genres are available to students within your classroom? How many students read across genres?
• Do students have multiple opportunities to develop vocabulary and concept knowledge through texts? Through discussion of new ideas? Through direct instruction in vocabulary and concepts?
• Are students given substantial instruction in the accurate and automatic decoding of words?
• How much time do students spend writing texts for others to comprehend? With reading-writing connections emphasized?
• Are students afforded an environment rich in high-quality talk about text? About comprehension strategy instruction
• Are students taught to... _ identify their purpose for reading? _ preview texts before reading? _ make predictions before and during reading? _ activate relevant background knowledge for reading? _ think aloud while reading? _ use text structure to support comprehension? _ create visual representations to aid comprehension and recall? _ determine the important ideas in what they read? _ summarize what they read? _ generate questions for text? _ handle unfamiliar words during reading? _ monitor their comprehension during reading?
• Does instruction about these strategies include _ an explicit description of the strategy and when it should be used? _ modeling of the strategy in action? _ collaborative use of the strategy in action? _ guided practice using the strategy, with gradual release of responsibility? _ independent practice using the strategy? About other teaching considerations
• Are students helped to orchestrate multiple strategies, rather than using only one at a time?
• Are the texts used for instruction carefully chosen to match the strategy and students being taught?
• Is there concern with student motivation to engage in literacy activities and apply strategies learned?
• Are students’ comprehension skills assessed on an ongoing basis?


Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies
Sheena Cameron 2009

  • Comprehension is one of the most challenging issues facing teachers today.  We know that although many students are accurate and fluent decoders, this does not always translate into having a good understanding of the text.  Reading comprehension is important because without it a student is not truly reading.
  • Proficient readers are active readers.  They actively engage with the text using a number of strategies to gain meaning

Before reading, good readers:
  • Active their prior knowledge
  • Are clear about why they are reading a particular text
  • Know the type of text they are about to read
  • Preview the text
  • Make predictions
  • Ask questions

During reading, good readers:
  • Construct and revise meaning
  • Monitor their understanding of the text
  • Continue revising and adjusting their predictions and questions
  • Use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words and concepts
  • Make connections with ideas in the text
  • Make inferences

After reading, good readers:
  • Evaluate whether the text met their purpose for reading
  • Revisit their predictions and questions and adjust and revise them if necessary
  • Are able to summarize what they have read
  • Synthesise what they have read

  • Authors and researchers include from 6 to 18 strategies as being important for reading comprehensions
  1. Nine key strategies that appear to come up the most often in research
  2. Two strategies that are important but tend to be less well documented
  3. Two sets of strategies that are indispensable to readers at any level
  • Word attack strategies - to help clarify the meanings of unknown words and
  • Fix-up strategies - what to do if meaning breaks down at word or text level

Reading comprehension strategies:
Group 1 - key strategies
  1. Activating prior knowledge
  2. Self-monitoring
  3. Predicting
  4. Questioning
  5. Making connections
  6. Visualising
  7. Inferring
  8. Summarizing
  9. Synthesising

Group 2 - other useful strategies
  1. Skimming
  2. Scanning

Group 3 - additional strategy sets
  1. Word attack strategies
  2. Fix-up strategies

  • There is compelling evidence to say we can teach these strategies to students.  Nell Duke and David Pearson write in ‘What Research Has to Say about Reading Instruction’:
A large volume of work indicates that we can help students acquire the strategies and processes used by good readers - and that this improves their overall comprehension of the text, both the texts used to teach the strategies and the texts they read on their own in the future . . .
There is a large not overwhelming number and range of techniques that work, yet the use of even one technique alone has been shown to improve students’ comprehension.  Teaching what we call collections or packages of comprehension strategies can help students become truly solid comprehenders of many kinds of text.

  • Explicit teaching is best - research tells us that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction.  Explicit teaching requires teachers to tell readers what the strategies are, why and when to use them, and how to apply them.
  • A co-operative learning model works well.  Cooperative learning groups - where students work with a buddy or in a small group of up to four students to complete a clearly defined task - have been shown to be an effective way to teach reading comprehension strategies.
  • One area of teaching reading that has taken a low profile for some time has been the role vocabulary plays in reading comprehension.

TERM 1
Our syndicates focus and goal:
In the Year 5 and 6 cohort, we aim to shift 17 students (including 5 Māori students) currently achieving below the standard to at least ‘At’ or ‘Above’ the standard.

 We believe that if these students had better reading comprehension strategies their achievement in reading would be higher.
Year 5/6 BASELINE DATA:
The Year 5/6 OTJ’s against the National Standards data in Reading shows that in November 2015, 18% (17/97) students were achieving below; of these, 25% are boys, 24% (4/17) are Māori students and .05% (1/17) are Pasifika students.

 Data Anaylsis

  • 18% of all of our Senior students are below the reading standard
  • 25% of all Senior boys students are below the standard
  • 12% of all Senior female students are below the standard
  • 68% of our Senior students are at the standard or above


Reflection on My Inquiry - Final Assessment
1.9.15
Today we completed our final assessment, marking the end of our inquiry focus. These are some of the observation I have made upon reading over what they have created.

My Thoughts:
The boys seemed to thrive more during this assessment piece than the girls. The boys chose to do the factual piece of writing on the kiwi bird. The girls choose to do the more emotional piece of writing on a person who is important to use.
The boys were able to logically sequence their ideas, and could construct detailed paragraph around strong themes (habitat, diet, characteristics etc), where as the girls pieces of writing got emotional, and lacked as much structure as their previous pieces of writing. They spent time writing lines such as 'i love them', rather than writing about things such as what their person may look like, and why they are special to me.
I also found that Joshua's piece of writing was probably the best out of all of the four students. I am wondering if this is because this is his second round of being involved in my inquiry, and perhaps having these 2 sessions has had a very major impact on his writing ability.

Reflection on my Inquiry - Last 5 Weeks:
What have you implemented or changed to your practice since starting your inquiry?  Why have you chosen these things to implement or change?
Things that I have implemented into my program:

  • Creation of writing matrix in student speak
  • One on one time almost daily
  • explicit instruction and explanation of what the group W.A.L.T
  • Group created success criteria
  • sessions breaking down our new Level 3 Writing Matrix in child speak
  • Support to share each others writing and mark off the matrix in buddy situation
  • Working with a writing buddy closely for support, sounding off ideas, sharing writing and peer assessing

What changes do you notice in your students abilities or work ethics since you started working intensively with them?

  • Students can explicitly show where in their writing have achieved the success criteria
  • Students can give specific advice and suggestions on how a group member can improve their writing
  • Writing has significantly improved, with higher interest and more awareness of the reader
  • Students now have more skills in how to plan and can do so with more detail
  • Students understand the purpose of the writing matrix and how this can make them a better writer
  • Students can work together to create a purposeful and specific success criteria

Have your focus kids made shifts?  How do you know they have improved?

 I have found that my girl students have made a dramatic shift.  Their poetry writing by the end of the term had a wide variety of thought out, planned adjective and descriptive verbs.  Their planning is more detailed and the girls spend a lot of time talking and writing together.  They will usually offer suggestions to each sentence they write, and are proactive at using a thesaurus.  The girls will usually take the group modelling book back to the table to use as a model for their own work.
However, I feel the boys writing haven't made as bigger change.  They are active members during group work and can actively give suggestions for models we create together in the group modelling book.  Once back at their desks though they will usually slip back into their old habits and forget to include the ideas we have discussed at group time.  However, when it is time to share back as a group, the boys will lesson to the feedback given to them from their peers and use this to make positive revisions to their writing during the editing stage.

What will you try next with these students?  

  • Encourage the boys to use the modelling book, and take it with them during their writing sessions
  • Create situations where the boys need to talk together and share ideas during writing as the girls do - perhaps create opportunities for the group to write a piece of writing together?
  • support students to see the differences between poetic writing and factual writing (reports)
  • Create a Level 3 matrix for report writing so students can use this with their next writing genre focus

Inquiry - Reflection 9.6.15

What has worked well?

  • Working in small groups
  • Having the remaining students continue with the set task AND once finished working independently on selected writing tasks
  • Using a buddy system where other students are selected to read and critique the writing of others and give feedback
  • Having a list of literacy tasks available for extension students to continue on with once finished
  • Encouraging inquiry students to ‘slow down’ when writing and rereading to check that their message is clear

Problems?

  • Meeting the needs of other students while meeting the needs of the other students
  • Not having enough time to view all students books daily

Next steps?

  • Continue to work on learning goals of inquiry students whilst continuing to support the needs of lower students as well as extension students (through grouping).


Teacher Only Day 22nd May 2015
Share our Readings:
Krystal - Principles of instruction - BES
Discuss these handbooks - need to look over these
Over all theme and ideas to ensure that we provide models of good levels of writing
Worked-out examples allow
students to focus on the specific steps that can solve the problems and


thus reduce the cognitive load on their working memory. Modelling and


worked examples are used successfully to help students learn to solve


problems in mathematics, science, writing and reading comprehension.
tasks. When teaching students to write an essay, for example, first the


teacher modelled how to write each paragraph, then the students and


teacher worked together on two or more new essays and, finally, students


worked on their own with supervision from the teacher.
clear in practise in order for children to achieve success they need worked out examples with specific steps that they do alongside the teacher - moving into working independantly without supervision.  Show them how they can show the success criteria in thier writing before i begin, and also being able to share my  and being specific about here i can show i have achieved the success criteira.
Rachel:
Purpose based writing by Julliete twist
Writing for a purpose - rather than genre based writing it was more about the fact that they were meeting the purpose for the writing.  Teacherts need to be explicit about what the purpose.
Children had to have tasks that fill fulled a purpose rather than lets writie


Rule follow and imitation are at odds of essential qualities of purpose based writing.  Knowing what a good writing does so they recgonise whats missing.
Need our writers to be adaptable, inivative, timely and resposnive to unique situations.
Examplar texts are essential - to pull apart and discover


Sonya:
Sustaining improvements in student achievement - Set 2010
Needs sustainablity when doing an inquiry - continous
Need to geth together with collouges and have lots of discussions with different levels and talk with outside experts.
look at Specific learning needs - not making generalisations
Elysia:
Using multmodal texts to build enegagement and achievement in literacy
using different things to do literacy not just pen and paper-audio-building-playdough - visual kinesthetic increase in on task behaviour
what makes writing good:
all kids have to a clear idea of what good writing is- they need to have prior knowledge, experiences. Children to be trained in the use of rubrics being used to using these. Important for all writers to know thier audience who you are writing for.
When giving feedback as the reader as opposed to what is wrong


Next Steps:
Unpack a poem together as a class/buddy - where do we notice each of the criteria in a ‘good’ poem - Could use flanders field poem
Children assessment using our next steps poetry rubric - our children don’t know this criteria yet so we need to meet with each of them to do this effectively.
Bring to next syndicate meeting:
Profile - bring these to share
Highlighted rubrixs
Poetry - anaylise these and bring children needs and next steps
Meeting 5.5.15
Testing we will do:
  • OTJ teacher
  • Writing sample
  • STEPS 2 (standardised)
  • GAP analysis 1 inquiry kids
  • ARB - writing
Testing for the Elysia to find a standardised test dictation
Testing for deeper features
Writing sample for next writing focus
Myra to investigate further into other standardised tests that we could use.
Next steps:
Our hunch is if the kids are aware of the task expectations and the targets they need to achieve, they will more purposely work towards achieving them
Research further to investigate whether this hunch is supported by research and is proven to make a difference.  
To research and find out how other people do this.
Rachel’s idea for identifying senses is children need to draw a picture of the senses in the margin
Inquiry where to next?  
Individual profile
know who your students  are
reading that backs up our hunch for the teacher only day
Reflection on last weeks course.  What did we pick up on that we can use in our inquiry

  • editing symbols
  • senses symbols to identify things in their writing from the success criteria
  • keeping the success criteria simple
  • having just parts of the goals
  • feedback and feedforward cards
  • asking students to only to correct three errors based on the WALT
  • talk allows during writing time
  • taking photos of work and putting up on the board
  • having a cool down

Reflection from our teacher only day (21.8.15) on our inquiry with the links to the PTC and Tataiako







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