Action research kindergarten reading
Text available on ad full texteric number: ed531180record type: non-journalpublication date: 2012-maypages: 124abstractor: as providedreference count: 57isbn: n/aissn: n/aimplementing guided reading strategies with kindergarten and first grade studentsabbott, lindsey; dornbush, abby; giddings, anne; thomas, jenniferonline submission, master of arts action research project, st. Xavier universityin the action research project report, the teacher researchers found that many kindergarten and first-grade students did not have the reading readiness skills to be reading at their benchmark target. The teacher researchers noticed that the students lacked reading readiness skills that were necessary to meet grade level benchmarks. The teacher researchers used a parent survey, baseline assessments, and observational checklist to document evidence. The teacher researchers found from the parent survey that students who lacked interest in books and reading them demonstrated low reading readiness skills. The observational checklist indicated difficulty with segmenting sounds, letter sound knowledge, inability to rhyme, decoding difficulties and reading miscues, poor comprehension, lack of interest in books, lack of print awareness skills, poor attentions spans, lack of response during whole group instruction, and off-task behaviors.
The teacher researchers used a variety of interventions to improve their students overall reading skills. These interventions included small guided reading groups, word work, phonemic awareness drills, and posters that gave visual clues on how to decode unknown words. In the guided reading groups the students were paired with other students at their same reading ability. The students overall reading growth was the most notable result taken from the action research project. The teacher researchers concluded that the interventions used during this research project helped to promote reading readiness skills in most of the targeted students. Descriptors: check lists, reading readiness, phonemics, action research, economically disadvantaged, reading strategies, phonemic awareness, teaching methods, grade 1, kindergarten, reading skills, reading motivation, emergent literacy, reading difficulties, intervention, small group instruction, visual aids, decoding (reading), behavior problems, drills (practice), parents, surveys, time on task, cooperative learning, reading comprehension, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency, at risk students, rural schools, urban schoolspublication type: dissertations/theses; tests/questionnaireseducation level: early childhood education; elementary education; grade 1; kindergartenaudience: n/alanguage: englishsponsor: n/aauthoring institution: n/aidentifiers - location: y | copyright | contact us | selection policyjournals | non-journals | download | submit | text available on ad full texteric number: ed531180record type: non-journalpublication date: 2012-maypages: 124abstractor: as providedreference count: 57isbn: n/aissn: n/aimplementing guided reading strategies with kindergarten and first grade studentsabbott, lindsey; dornbush, abby; giddings, anne; thomas, jenniferonline submission, master of arts action research project, st.
Descriptors: check lists, reading readiness, phonemics, action research, economically disadvantaged, reading strategies, phonemic awareness, teaching methods, grade 1, kindergarten, reading skills, reading motivation, emergent literacy, reading difficulties, intervention, small group instruction, visual aids, decoding (reading), behavior problems, drills (practice), parents, surveys, time on task, cooperative learning, reading comprehension, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency, at risk students, rural schools, urban schoolspublication type: dissertations/theses; tests/questionnaireseducation level: early childhood education; elementary education; grade 1; kindergartenaudience: n/alanguage: englishsponsor: n/aauthoring institution: n/aidentifiers - location: y | copyright | contact us | selection policyjournals | non-journals | download | submit | multimedia. Using action research for reading program research can be conducted on almost any process, but for school improvement purposes, it should be directed primarily toward improving student learning. In this book, we will focus on reading, applying the action research process to improving student proficiency in reading and to examining the quality of our reading research is one of the tools we can use to help us respond in an integrative and informed manner, instead of a reactive or merely compliant manner. The action research process provides a structure for continuously assessing the effects of actions and seeking more effective ones if needed. Nice thing about using an action research approach is that a school team or faculty can use it to study students' progress in reading and the breadth, depth, and multidimensionality of their program, whatever materials are being used—be they commercially published (such as high/scope, scholastic, open court, guided reading) or a locally developed curriculum. For action research is simply a structured process for addressing a problem or answering questions with the intention of using the resulting information to make improvements.
Additionally, the research process can be conducted individually by a single teacher in a classroom or collaboratively among several persons with similar interests. I am going to write as if you and i were engaging in schoolwide or organization-wide action research. This allows us to look at what is happening to all students in our setting and to consider more fully the curriculum and instructional experiences they action research e the process for examining reading programs described in this book uses a schoolwide or districtwide action research framework, it's important to understand what that framework is, how it works, and when it's useful. Help us pursue the information we need to answer these questions, we have the action research matrix (figure 1. Some of you may be familiar with using this matrix to design plans for schoolwide action research (calhoun, 1994, 2002). Simons, ga: the phoenix matrix includes a place to identify the student learning goal that a faculty selects for its collective focus as well as six domains, or cells, of inquiry and action.
Cells 4, 5, and 6 focus on the formal learning environment, which in this case comprises the reading program elements: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and the organization of students and and district staff are asked to use both on-site and external information as they set their benchmarks and desired levels of performance for students (cell 3) and as they select actions to study and implement in their classrooms and schools (cell 6). The sequence of the matrix is designed to help staff explore the research base and move beyond what is currently known or done in their school or setting. However, it is only a guide to domains of inquiry and action, not a rigid set of 's visit elwood elementary, where the staff are learning to use action research to study the development of reading vocabulary. The actions of the elwood staff help illustrate the six domains of inquiry in the action research matrix (figure 1. Research matrix in elementary is a prekindergarten through grade 5 school in a small town near a large metropolitan area. She has put a lot of energy into studying student results from the past five years, meeting with parents and community members, inviting board members for regular visits to the school, and reading books or team teaching in classrooms almost every day.
Helen is determined to improve student achievement, and she and the staff have decided to tackle reading first and use action research to structure their collective work. Susie, the curriculum director for the district, is a skilled action research facilitator, and helen has asked susie to work closely with them as they get year after she arrived, helen formed a school leadership team (made up of seven teachers, the counselor, and the principal) that facilitates across classroom study and action, and she has asked teachers to form study groups. 2002) in their prekindergarten program the previous year because of its promised effects and its use of reading and writing in building students' literacy and communication skills, and they also added the preschool child observation record (high/scope, 2003) to help them monitor student progress. This year all the kindergarten and 1st grade teachers have been participating in a yearlong staff development course offered by their intermediate service agency. First and 2nd grade teachers are seeing some improvements in students' use of language, and their impressions are confirmed by the data from informal reading inventories. Third through 5th grade teachers have been working with reciprocal teaching to improve reading comprehension; however, most of their students still struggle with any but the simplest text.
They still have far too many students reading far below grade students' needs are so great that the staff could begin with any priority student learning goal or major curriculum standard and make progress. However, as they began their action research process, they decided that their school focus would be on “expanding reading vocabulary and word analysis skills” because they think bringing that about would make the most difference in accelerating literacy for the most students. Observe how the elwood staff, with some support from susie, uses the structure of the action research matrix to guide their collective 1—current student of the first things elwood's leadership team did was organize the existing and easily available student achievement data from the previous year's reading results on the norm-referenced tests administered statewide at the 3rd and 5th grades. You can see, at 3rd grade, 37 percent of elwood students were in the bottom quartile in reading overall, with 68 percent of the students scoring below the 50th percentile. In reviewing these results, staff also noticed that after the first year, scores were somewhat higher on vocabulary than on reading comprehension. Questions were raised about whether this was related to the content of the tests, to the fact that the same tests had been used for three years, or to the possibility that students' understanding of vocabulary had exceeded their reading comprehension skills.
They located and studied the research synthesis “conditions of vocabulary acquisition” by beck and mckeown (1991), “the vocabulary conundrum” by anderson and nagy (1992), and several pieces by linnea ehri on how students learn to read words (they especially liked the directness and clarity of the 1999 aera paper). She also realized that the district's curriculum documents needed to provide teachers with a better conceptual map of how reading, vocabulary, and word analysis skills 3—student performance and responses we would like to leadership team led the staff through an exercise to help everyone reflect on the student results they had looked at earlier, on information about how students develop vocabulary, and on student achievement data from comparable schools. They would also attempt to move at least 20 percent of their students out of the bottom quartile of the vocabulary and comprehension portions of the local curriculum assessments by the time the tests were administered the next was some discussion about how to involve students in assessing their own reading and vocabulary growth, but neither the leadership team nor the staff wanted to set any performance benchmarks yet. Lisa had just finished her master's thesis, titled “strategies for building vocabulary for kindergarten through third grade. The team asked her to present a summary of her research review, the best references and teaching resources she had found, and her student results. The following points made by lisa generated quite a bit of discussion among team members:A variety of approaches to teaching phonics for decoding unfamiliar words are effective as long as they are students to locate and write definitions is not an effective approach to building vocabulary or word ing struggling and average readers to use print dictionaries is not effective in building ing around grade 3, the amount a student reads is the major determinant of his vocabulary textbooks do not include enough information about key concept words to help students understand the concepts or add the words to their sight shared some of the resources on vocabulary instruction she had used to design interventions in her individual teacher research.
Other resources that were brought to the team as part of this initial screening included two that the 1st grade teachers had used during their yearlong staff development: an article by the cunninghams (1992) titled “making words: enhancing the invented spelling-decoding connection,” and a short book by calhoun (1999) titled teaching beginning reading and writing with the picture word inductive model. And a research synthesis by ehri, nunes, stahl, and willows (2001) titled “systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: evidence from the national reading panel's meta-analysis. On the response sheets, they are to identify the curriculum emphases and instructional techniques that, according to the authors, hold the most promise for accelerating literacy, especially for building reading 6—learning environment we would like to the culmination of the february retreat, after a strenuous day of sifting through many apparently effective techniques and identifying recommendations and resources to share with the staff, the team felt comfortable with the student learning focus and the plan to work on expanding sight vocabulary and teaching students word recognition strategies they could use to add words to their reading and writing storehouses. After some debates and compromises, the team finally agreed to five curriculum, instruction, and assessment initiatives to recommend for schoolwide support and study in their focus area of expanding reading vocabulary and word analysis skills: (1) ask every teacher to teach students at least two strategies for building reading vocabulary and to help students assess their use of these strategies; (2) increase read-alouds to students from prekindergarten through grade 5; (3) increase the amount of reading by all students, k–5, from picture books to chapter books; (4) use the picture-word inductive model with beginning readers k–2 and as part of social studies units in grades 3 through 5; and (5) select or begin to build a common set of up-close assessments of students' sight vocabulary and word analysis skills in both reading and principal and team leader agreed to draft these five initiatives into an action and staff development plan along with timelines, resources, and a budget, and to get it back to the team within two weeks. The curriculum director and lisa planned to contact the regional intermediate service agency consultant to see if she could provide staff development on strategies for building reading vocabulary and on assessing vocabulary growth. Other staff members would be asked to lead staff development and planning sessions on their other three initiatives (read-alouds, wide reading, and the picture-word inductive model).
The team reviewed the action plan and made necessary modifications, it went to all staff members for review, along with several resources and excerpts that forecast what the staff would be studying and implementing under these the school action plan was submitted to the staff and commitments were made, a number of social and school culture issues began to swirl around elwood's next steps. Leadership team members worried about getting their study group members to read articles and research. The six teachers who would be providing staff development on readalouds, wide reading, and the picture word inductive model worried about how to get their colleagues to study implementation and plan lessons and instructional moves the way they did. In as many ways as she could, helen thanked those concerned for their willingness to lead and reassured them that she would be participating in everything— the reading and study group discussions, the staff development, and learning and implementing the strategies— and that time would be protected at least twice a month for staff to work together, not counting their regular study group course, this was just the beginning of elwood's journey toward accelerating literacy for all students. Action research provides them with a structure for cycles of continuous inquiry into student and staff learning, and the will of the leaders—the principal, the teachers, and the curriculum director—provides the energy that will make it possible. Let's juxtapose a few of the actions of the elwood faculty to attributes of successful school improvement efforts: focus on student learning, focus on staff learning, use of data, whole-school participation, use of the research base, use of external technical assistance, cross-role learning by all members of the organization, and leadership that elevates the focused its collective study on student learning, specifically student development in reading.
While faculty members examined existing student data on both vocabulary and reading comprehension, they decided to work first on improving reading vocabulary. The other dimensions of reading development were not ignored; they were just not in the foreground for systematic formal study by the faculty as a y members used their existing school and district data and sought out assessment tools that would give them more information about students' vocabulary development and use of word analysis skills. The district curriculum director works with the team as a technical assistant to model the action research process and help the team learn to use it. However, it is not just team members involved in studying the data, analyzing instructional and assessment practices, and studying the knowledge base in reading; all faculty members participate in the collective study. The principal and many teachers—but not all of them—believe that student achievement in reading can improve. The strength and skills of the organizationally designated leaders, the principal and the curriculum director, work in tandem to make this kind of professional study and discourse finally, elwood uses its school action plan to organize collective study and serve as a binding agreement for actions.