McKown and Barnett, Essay Example

A Literature Review of McKown and Barnett’s  “Improving Reading Comprehensionthrough Higher-Order Thinking Skills”

Mckown and Barnett’s “Improving Reading Comprehension through Higher-Order Thinking Skills” documents the attempts of a team of teacher-researchers to increase their student’s reading comprehension. Although this document is written in the third-person, the document refers to those conducting the study as “teacher researchers,” therefore, it seems likely that this is a primary source.The goal of the teacher-researchers in this project was to help increase their students’ reading comprehension by introducing them to “higher order thinking skills.”

The questions asked by the researchers in this study included the following:

• Did teacher modeling improve student comprehension?
• Did teacher think-aloud processes increase student comprehension?

• Did graphic organizers help students retain knowledge?

The goal of this research was to establish a relationship between higher-order thinking skills and student comprehension. The independent variables were the use of teacher-modeling; think-aloud processes and graphic organizers, while the dependent variables were the levels of comprehension and retention.The dependant variable is very similar to the dependent variable in my own research, which examines whether or not there is a link between students’ reading comprehension and their achievement.

In order to answer their research questions, the teacher-researchers began introducing one new learning strategy at a time. First they introduced teacher modeling, then think-alouds and then they encouraged students to practice a variety of comprehension strategies, including inferring, predicting, making connections, visualizing, summarizing and questioning. Finally, they employed graphic organizers for each strategy. Each of these strategies was used in a whole class setting as well as in individual group sessions. The teachers also encouraged students to analyze the strategies they used and to record their analysis in journals. The testing sample included third and fourth grade students in their respective classrooms. The school the students attended is located in the Midwestern part of the United States.

Because this study lacked any sort of control, it was hard to tell whether student scores simply improved as they spent more time in school, or whether the strategies employed by the teachers actually worked. Furthermore, while the teachers did see an increase in reading comprehension, it was not clear from their study which methods worked best to increase comprehension, whether any could improve comprehension individually or whether every strategy had to be employed to result in such a change.

The teacher-researchers used three tools to measure the success of their strategies. These were the Metacomprehension Strategy index, which measured the awareness students had of strategic reading before the teachers introduced new strategies to them.  One teacher also used the “the State Snapshots of Early Literacy Test” to analyze her students reading comprehension development.Another used “Test Ready’s Practice Reading Comprehension Test” for the same purpose.Each teacher used a “Teacher Observation Checklist” to measure student progress through the research period. This allowed them to keep track of changes in student learning as well as whether or not students implemented the introduced strategies.

The researchers found that students were able to successfully employ each of the learning strategies to their work, both in a class-wide and in individual and group settings. They also found through their MSI analyses that the strategies increased student knowledge and comprehension. Students who had scored under 40% on predicting in their MSI before-reading pretests scored over 70% on their post tests. They made similar gains in previewing, purpose setting, self-questioning and drawing from background knowledge. The students made even more progress after reading. Those who scored below 30% in predicting on their pretests scored over 60%. Those who scored under 15% in self-questioning scored well over 60%. They made similar gains in “drawing from background knowledge” and summarizing.

At the end of six months, the students also made gains in their Test-Ready scores. Two students remained at the same level, but fourteen of the sixteen students tested made significant gains in reading comprehension. The teacher researchers concluded that making use of the learning strategies increased comprehension.

References

McKown, B., & Barnett, C. L. (2007). Improving Reading Comprehension Through Higher-Order Thinking Skills. Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Saint Xavier University, Chicago.