Analysis of the Students' Change
Overall the students who participated in the focus group showed growth when using the four strategies from the reciprocal teaching method. Each strategy, when taught in isolation, increased the comprehension of the text for each individual learner in a positive way. Once the strategy of clarification was clearly understood the students were able to incorporate the other strategies successfully when encountering text, be it narrative or expository. The strategies of clarification and question generation took the longest time to master, but through constant use and modeling by the teacher and those students who grasped it quickly the results were positive for each member of the focus group.
Students have slowly started to show a deeper understanding that clarification is more than vocabulary development. The students have demonstrated better attack skills on vocabulary by being able to independently examine context clues to extract meaning. Scaffolding off of this the students have begun to look more into the author's use of language as a way of developing plot and becoming more inferential by reading between the lines for clearer comprehension.
The ability of the students to create questions that are both reflective and beneficial to the reader has improved through constant modeling and practicing. The students in the focus group demonstrated the ability to not only create higher level thinking questions but are now able to look at a question, either created by themselves or by someone else, and establish if it is inferential or literal, or whether or not it is significant to the plot line. Students were able to create questions in expository text better than narrative text, even though narrative text was practiced longer. This could be because expository text lends itself easily to the creation of questions, while narrative text takes a more concise thought process which shows higher level thinking on an independent level.
The ability of the students in the focus group to summarize text was an easier process than clarification and question generation. Students were able to get directly to the essence of the plot line and eliminate any unnecessary information better than before the intervention. Students still need practice on using the summaries as starting points for creating good reflective questions.
Predictions generated by the students were high quality and demonstrated that through using the clarification process better predictions can be made. Across the board the students were able to hypothesize where the plot line was going and support their thoughts with valid examples from previously read material.
As the students began to use the strategies together they were able to increase their ability to master each individual strategy and examine how each one is necessary for comprehension to occur. Rubric scores increased over the course of five months and students continued to demonstrate an improvement in each strategy due to constant use of graphic organizers and discussion groups. It is important to note that students benefited significantly from using their graphic organizers as a focal point in cooperative groups and working together to clarify and review the text on a consistent basis.
It is also important to point out that every learner needs an opportunity to reflect on their own work. Every student in the focus group indicated through self-evaluations that the strategies were immensely helpful to improving the way they read text. Each student also indicated that they realize how important it is to use these strategies whenever they encounter any type of text, be it at school or on their own. This is extremely gratifying to hear after all the time spent on these strategies.
A majority of the students in the focus group were able to transfer the four strategies to expository text and understood how to use them as a way of increasing their own comprehension. This showed that metacognition was taking place with the students and they also began to internalize the necessary components for effective comprehension of text. Continual review of expository text is required for true metacognition to occur.