Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers’ comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers’ beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers’ comprehension of multiple texts and the processes used by readers to make sense of texts. Eighty‐three students (grades 5–7) participated in this mixed‐methods study. The sample consisted of monolingual students and emergent and proficient bilingual students who completed measures of expository comprehension, strategic knowledge and awareness, English‐language proficiency, prior content knowledge, and epistemic beliefs. Ten bilingual students from this sample also completed a think‐aloud protocol to allow for close examination of their meaning‐making processes. In a multiple regression analysis, English‐language proficiency was the strongest predictor of comprehension, followed by content knowledge. Strategy knowledge and awareness and epistemic beliefs were not related to multiple‐text comprehension in the model. The relationship between English‐language proficiency and comprehension was stronger for bilingual students than for monolingual students. Students in the think‐aloud sample demonstrated emergent knowledge of processes of disciplinary reading of multiple texts, including metacognitive monitoring, theorizing authorial identity, and intertextual integration, while also displaying a tendency to defer to institutionalized authority when evaluating credibility of the texts. The findings provide directions for future research on the way young adolescents comprehend and learn from expository texts in the discipline of science.
During the 2011–2012 academic year, Texas public schools began administering the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) in grades 3–8, replacing the old testing system, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). The TAKS–STAAR transition is a unique contextual backdrop for studying the role of state‐mandated reading and writing tests in the assessment and learning environments of elementary and middle schools. In this study, drawing on extensive interview data, we detail the test‐centric instructional practices related to reading and writing that were made evident during the transition and the uncertainties about instruction that were brought about by the implementation of the new test. We also propose three concepts that help explain how test‐centric practices maintain their deep entrenchment in literacy instruction: transfer avoidance, managerial partitioning, and the acceptability of overreaching inferences. Although the transition described in this article is specific to one region of the United States, the findings have implications for future research in other settings.
The authors offer guidance on recognizing and resisting test‐centric instruction in reading comprehension. They posit that five practices indicate a test‐centric view of comprehension: when the tested content is privileged, when the test becomes the text, when annotation requirements replace strategic thinking, when test items frame how students think, and when item‐level data are overinterpreted. The authors express concern that test‐centric literacy instruction has started to replace research‐based instructional practices more and more. Using a sociocultural lens, the authors describe what young readers are likely to learn (and not learn) about reading comprehension when they are immersed in this form of instruction. The article provides talking points that teachers can use to bolster their efforts to resist test preparation pressures that they may experience in their schools.
Researchers and policymakers in the US and beyond increasingly seek to identify teaching qualities that are associated with academic achievement gains for K-12 students through effectiveness studies. Yet teaching quality varies with academic content and social contexts, involves multiple participants, and requires a range of skills, knowledge, and dispositions. In this essay, we address the inescapable tension between complexity and scale in research on teaching effectiveness. We provide five recommendations to study designers and analysts to manage this tension to enhance effectiveness research, drawing on our recent experiences as the first external analysts of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study. Our recommendations address conceptual framing, the measurement of teaching (e.g., observation protocols, student surveys), sampling, classroom videoing, and the use and interpretation of value-added models.
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