An analytic description of ProjectExpert: An instructional reading program for ninth grade vocational students

Abstract

A significant number of ninth-grade students still struggles with proficiently comprehending texts. Moreover, their increasingly lowering motivation to read is alarming. Various educational interventions designed to enhance reading comprehension and/or motivation are available in the scientific field. However, a detailed description of its underlying principles is frequently lacking. This detailed description could provide genuine opportunities for replication, theory building, and dissemination into practice. Therefore, the main goal of the present study is to offer an analytic, rigorous, and detailed description of an instructional program aimed at fostering ninth-grade vocational students' reading comprehension, strategy use, and autonomous reading motivation, named ProjectExpert. The context, theoretical and/or empirical grounding, macro and micro-level design principles will be outlined, based on the framework of Bouwer and De Smedt (2018). ProjectExpert entails four design principles: (1) Text reading is goal-directed. (2) The instruction is embedded in a motivating learning environment rooted in the fulfilment of students' basic psychological needs. (3) By means of explicit strategy instruction students are taught to use a repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive reading comprehension strategies. (4) Students practice reading and applying reading strategies in heterogeneous pairs. Moreover, during the design, a stepwise procedure was adopted to guarantee the feasibility and usability of the design principles for this particular group of teachers and students. This stepwise procedure and the implications for the design of ProjectExpert are described in detail. Finally, the relational structure of the design principles and challenges related to implementing them into practice are discussed.

The Impact of a Tier 1 Intervention on Fifth and Sixth Graders’ Reading Comprehension, Reading Strategy Use, and Reading Motivation

“…A ten-session intervention was developed based on the theoretical and empirical insights discussed in the introduction (e.g., Okkinga et al, 2018;Van Ammel et al, 2021).…”

“…Our intervention was called "Iedereen Leesatleet" (Everybody Reading Athlete). Following Van Ammel et al (2021), the athlete metaphor referred to the high level of training and engagement required to comprehend texts (Duke et al, 2011;Goldman et al, 2016). The intervention condition students received no other reading comprehension instruction beyond the intervention itself.…”

“…Students were assigned roles (e.g., player or coach, referring to the athlete metaphor), with the player reading the text aloud and the coach drawing attention to the learned strategies by means of the strategy cards illustrated in Appendix A (e.g., What does this word mean?) (based on Van Ammel et al, 2021). The students alternated roles each lesson.…”

Metacognition as a Reading Strategy in Incoming University Students

“…The use of structured reading strategies helps to carry out deeper analyses of what is read, but little is known about the frequency of teaching this type of strategies in the classroom (Brevik, 2019), eventually, teachers play an important role in literacy worldwide, but often inexperience in the application of strategies to improve reading comprehension predominates (Tiba, 2023), Certainly, for educators who actively participate in literacy programs, the use of strategies that improve students' reading comprehension is of vital importance (Hungwe, 2019). At present there are many students who have difficulties in comprehension of texts and it is alarming that they have less and less motivation to read (Van Ammel et al, 2021), so it is recommended that teachers include specific instruction on reading strategies within their classes to counteract one of the most worrying problems of today's society such as the low reading ability of students (Kissau & Hiller, 2013), since for many students it is a skill which they struggle to perfect . Although it is always recommended to use reading strategies, sometimes it is necessary to first address the underlying problems of the student's language (Nippold, 2017), since several studies have shown that difficulties in reading comprehension can be associated with what is known as limited vocabulary or lexical poverty (Miranda et al, 2011), without neglecting that one of the main causes of the low level of reading comprehension of students is the ineffectiveness of the strategies employed by educators (Olifant et al,23).…”