Methodology
This experimentation will take place in a heterogeneous reading classroom in the sixth grade of the town's only middle school. The middle school instructs all the children from the town's six elementary schools, which starts at sixth grade and ends at eighth grade. The majority of the population is financially stable, if not moderately wealthy in this suburban town of North Attleboro. There are three teams that all the sixth graders are divided up into. On the team for the experimentation there are five reading classes that contain between 25 and 30 students a period and each class will be introduced to the reciprocal teaching approach.
The subjects for this study will be chosen based on an interest in participating in the experiment. The subjects chosen will display a span of learning abilities: 2 learners who show mastery of comprehension, 2 learners who are demonstrating growth in comprehension and 2 learners who demonstrate difficulty with comprehension. This will be established through observations and evaluations from the experimenter before the experimentation has begun. Text materials to be used will be fiction novels and later subject matter from the social studies curriculum.
The independent variable for this experiment is the use of the reciprocal teaching method by the learner as a comprehension strategy to use while interacting with text. The dependent variables will be based on the hypothesis that the learners that have more difficulty with the comprehension of text after being taught the reciprocal teaching method will show improvement with comprehension through their learning logs and graphic organizers. This strategy will later be applied by the learner to other forms of text, such as expository text.
An examination of the
dependent variables: The experimenter will take a baseline reading on the
following four variables: how much the students reflect on the text to clarify
misunderstood information or vocabulary; how accurate they are at identifying
the most appropriate questions based on previously read text; how detailed they
are at summarizing the who, what, when, where, why and how that the text is
providing; and how detailed children are at predicting what will happen next in
a story based on their prior reading knowledge. A final dependent variable is
the ability of the students to transfer this learned knowledge successfully
into other forms of text, like expository, and is able to apply it
appropriately without prompting from the teacher.
The design that will be
used is a multiple baseline across behaviors design where the experimenter will
teach the four concrete steps of reciprocal teaching in stages after a baseline
is established for each.