Student Samples
The students that were chosen for the research project were from a sixth grade team of approximately 135 students in the town's only middle school. The middle school is divided into three grade levels (6,7 and 8) and each grade level is divided into three different teams. My team is considered an inclusion team due to the fact that about one-fifth of the students require special educational services. All 135 students that are in my reading class were introduced to the reciprocal teaching method. Every week all of the students demonstrated their knowledge of using comprehension skills through verbal discussions, learning logs, graphic organizers and cooperative group reviews. By March each student had a clear and concise knowledge-base on the importance of using comprehension strategies when engaging with text. Although the modeling process was lengthy, it was valuable to the students to see the appropriate way of interacting with text, whether it be narrative or expository. Every student was required to demonstrate their grasp of the strategies by modeling the process for each other in cooperative groups on a weekly basis. It was evident by the end of March that many students had become more metacognitive with these strategies and were applying them to text, even when it was not mandatory to do so.
Focus Group
All students were offered the opportunity to become subjects for the experiment by having parents sign a permission slip allowing work samples to be analyzed. Six students were chosen randomly from the fifty who volunteered for the experiment to be part of the focus group. These six students were chosen based on previous observations by myself on their work done in the classroom and their ability to demonstrate comprehension while encountering text, both cooperatively and independently. Based on the beginning half of the year's observations and term grades two students were chosen who consistently demonstrated a high proficiency level of comprehension, two students were chosen who demonstrated adequate grade level comprehension abilities and two students were chosen who demonstrated inconsistent or below level comprehension abilities.