Conversations About Reading: The Voices of Students in their K-12 journey.

[摘要] CONVERSATIONS ABOUT READING: THE VOICES OFSTUDENTS IN THEIR K-12 JOURNEYJennifer Clinton, Ed DUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2004The initial objective of this study was to gain insight from students about their K-12 reading experience. In fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade the data were collected while conversing with students in focus groups. Conversations were centered around the Focus Group Checklist which was divided into three parts: 1) Teacher-Assigned Reading; 2) Read and Interact with Text; and 3) Content Areas. The second objective was to outline a process for documentation of student opinions about K-12 education programs.The results of this study indicated that (1) background building prior to reading assignments acted as a motivational component that enabled the fifth grade students tomake personal connections with text; (2) In both middle and high school, there was adiminishing in the practice of activating students' prior knowledge; (3) Vocabularyinstruction consisted of relearning words that fifth grade students were already familiarwith or knew well and; (4) limited opportunity for the application of new words;(5) Requirement for the learning of new words decreased as students moved throughhigh school; (6) Instruction for question and answer relationships consisted ofdirecting fifth grade students to reread or even pointing out where answers were found in the text; (7) Instruction that included modeling, utilization of samples, and specificcriteria for question and answer responses were provided only for the advanced students in eighth grade; (8) Reinforcement of literal responses from text were provided foreleventh graders instead of instruction for a critical response based on multiple sources and;(9) the advanced classes were often provided with explicit criteria and detail about how to answer questions.Recommendations and implications for policy based on the voices of the students were presented.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh

[效力级别] Secondary Reading