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The area of reading comprehension is one that greatly interests me, largely due to my participation in a Reading Comprehension project with ALEA. I believe there are many misconceptions about what actually constitutes ‘reading’ and how to best teach all elements. I believe that many teachers are too focussed on decoding and moving children up through the reading recovery levels, without focussing on deep comprehension. I therefore chose articles related to this topic. I should point out however, that it will be difficult to maintain ‘objectivity’ because of my personal beliefs.

Paper 1 – Woolley; G (2010) Developing reading comprehension: combining visual and verbal cognitive processes: Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 33, No.2, 2010. Pp 108-125

This study and article, focussed on children with good decoding skills but with poor listening comprehension. Woolley’s perspective is clear as he specifically proposes that a lot of comprehension difficulties are rooted in working memory problems but that teaching of specific visual and verbal comprehension strategies can help to overcome these difficulties. It went on to discuss a variety of the visual and verbal strategies that could be used. As each strategy was discussed, research finding were presented to back up the comments being made. These research findings were in the form of qualitative data gleaned from case studies from around the world. I found it a little frustrating that Woolley did not provide more details as to the form of research taken by the quoted studies. I believe this research was best done through observation. It could have involved interviews with the students and the teachers as well as analysis of work samples. Tests such as PAT R or Neale analysis could also have added to the data collected.

Paper 2 - McKeown, M., Beck, I., & Blake, R. (2009). Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 218-253

This 2 year study set out to determine which method of reading comprehension instruction produced better results, a strategies or a content approach. After examining much of the existing research on the area, McKeown et al identified issues that affected the validity of the findings. Many of these issues were related to standardization of instruction methods and verbal instructions accompanying them. This was taken into account when conducting their study. The strategies approach they used involved the direct teaching of procedures such as summarizing, making inferences, and generating questions, whilst the content approach focused on keeping students’ minds centred on the context of the material they were reading. They also included a control group which received instruction straight from the basal reader. Student participants were all fifth graders from one school in a small, urban district in Southwestern Pennsylvania. They were carefully selected from within 6 classrooms and the study was conducted within the regular classroom reading program. The study used decoding tests and reading comprehension tests to evaluate whether there were significant differences in the gains made by students. It was interesting to note that the gains, when noticed, were very minimal and the researchers themselves identified numerous weaknesses in their study. Once again this was a qualitative study although some statistics were involved. Before accepting the validity of their findings, I would like to see the study repeated in a variety of settings. I find it difficult to maintain my objectivity when reading this study, as I strongly believe that children need to be taught comprehension strategies. Maybe the researchers needed to broaden or alter their perspective, to acknowledge that any form of instruction that aims to enhance comprehension, whether it be strategy or content, is better than none.

Paper 3 – Lai.M, McNaughton.S, Amituanai-Toloa.M, Turner.R & Hsiao.S (2009). Sustained Acceleration of Achievement in Reading Comprehension: The New Zealand Experience. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 218-253

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental design study conducted over a period of three-years. It was the result of collaboration among schools, government, and researchers in New Zealand. Their aim was to ‘raise reading comprehension through critical discussions of achievement and teacher observation data and linking research on effective comprehension practices to specific needs.’ Lai et al (2009) p30

The study was conducted with students from 7 schools in a low socio-economic, urban centre in South Auckland. A lot of their work was aimed at teacher effectiveness and meeting the identified needs of the students. I was pleased to read that they increased the robustness of their study by replicating it in another district the following year. As Babbie (2011) p 7 states; ‘replication of inquiry provides another safeguard’. He goes on to point out how important this is when dealing with ethnic and racial prejudices, which I believe is relevant to this study as it was mainly instigated to deal with the issue of low comprehension amongst ethnic minorities.

Data in the study was collected through both testing and observation. PAT R and STAR tests were used to collect baseline and normalised statistics. Discussions were held with school leaders to identify issues within their communities. I feel that this study could have placed more emphasis on work sample analysis and discussion with the students. The study presented both quantitative and qualitative findings that the authors felt provided qualified support for their intervention.

As I read these papers, I still struggle to identify aspects of research practice- the terms don’t roll off my tongue yet. I can see that qualitative studies use different data collection techniques to quantitative studies so it would stand to reason that there would be times when one method was more appropriate than the other. Surely too, there would be times when validity of the study was increased by using techniques from both methods. I guess the important issue is initially identifying your research question, becoming aware of the paradigms you are operating from and within, then you can determine the most appropriate techniques to use. I still struggle with the paradigm idea. All of this work seems to me to fit with the symbolic interactionist paradigm as in all studies they were focussing on discussion and interaction within the classroom, about set texts, in order to increase comprehension. There may also be an element of the critical race theory, especially in the last 2 studies which focussed on children from different cultures. All studies seemed to be examples of microtheory which would fit with the social interactionist paradigm.