Problem and Hypothesis
The problem being investigated is that many students have
difficulty with the comprehension of reading in every grade level and teachers
are continually looking for instructional techniques that address this
problem. For this investigation I will
introduce one type of cognitive reading strategy, reciprocal teaching, to the
students as a way of improving their ability to comprehend both narrative and
expository text independently.
Both
the teacher and the learner are vital components for developing better
comprehension strategies. The role of
the teacher is to introduce the strategy of reciprocal teaching, explain how to
use it successfully, and model the strategy for the students over a lengthy
amount of time to allow the transfer of the strategy to become more permanent
as a learning approach. The final role
of the teacher is to monitor the students as they use the reciprocal teaching
strategy successfully and independently with text and watch for the transfer of
this strategy as they are incorporated with other types of texts, such as
expository text. The students now have
the important role of taking this knowledge and becoming more metacognitive
about their own learning by being active participants and taking control of
their own learning processing.
The outcomes that are
hypothesized to result from this experimentation are that students who are
having difficulty comprehending text will be taught the instructional strategy
of reciprocal teaching which will improve their reading ability with narrative
text and will then be able to transfer this knowledge to expository text. When
the students are introduced and shown how to better comprehend text they are
then able to transfer that knowledge into other subjects and be more conscious
of their own learning as they read on an independent basis. Since a competent reader actively constructs
meaning by interacting and transacting with the text the outcome of this
experiment should show that a student who is already successful at
comprehension demonstrates these strategies already and will show little
improvement with the introduction of a comprehension strategy like reciprocal
teaching. However, a student who has
not been successful at comprehension will show greater improvement with the
introduction of a comprehension strategy like reciprocal teaching. The experimenter is also interested in
seeing how a student who is somewhere in between these two types of learners
responds to the comprehension strategy of reciprocal teaching and it is
foreseen that an improvement, even slight, will be indicated as a result of the
experimentation.