Improving Content-Area Reading Using Instructional Graphics

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using a particular type of instructional graphic, a "frame," on fourth and fifth graders' ability to learn from reading their social studies textbooks. Six fourth-and six fifth-grade teachers taught social studies using either frames or the instruction suggested in the teacher's edition of the regular classroom social studies textbook. The treatment was repeated in four rounds (replications) during the school year. The major result from the combined analysis of the four rounds is that for fifth graders but not necessarily for fourth graders, framing was a more effective instructional technique than was the instruction suggested in the teacher's edition.Improving Content Area Reading -2 IMPROVING CONTENT AREA READING USING INSTRUCTIONAL GRAPHICSStudents have difficulty understanding and learning from informational text. A recent summary of findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1989) includes this dismal conclusion about the reading ability of American students:The failure of 61 percent of the 17-year-olds to demonstrate the ability to find, understand, summarize, and explain relatively complicated information, including material about topics they study in school, suggests that most students leaving secondary school do not have the comprehension skills often needed in the worlds of higher education, business, or government. 1983). Mayer (1984Mayer ( , 1989) presents an oversimplified, but nonetheless useful, conceptualization of the cognitive processes involved in meaningful learning from text. According to Mayer, meaningful learning depends on three basic processes--selecting, organizing, and integrating information.The first process, selecting, involves paying attention to the information in the text and, in particular, focusing attention on information that is relevant to the goals or task demands of the learning situation. The second process, organizing, involves arranging the units of selected information into a coherent mental structure. Mayer (1984) refers to this step as "building internal connections," or constructing logical relationships among ideas in the text. The third process, integrating, involves connecting the coherently organized information to existing cognitive structures. This process is also referred to as "building external connections" because it entails linking information from the text to information external to the text (but internal to the reader) (Mayer, 1984).The more elaborate and rich the internal and external connections among units of information, the more available and accessible the information is for later use (Prawat, 1989). Availability and accessibility of knowledge are hallmarks of meaningful learning.Expert, or skilled, readers are adept at all three basic cognitive processes, but novice (younger or poorer) readers are not. Among the readers who appear to have difficulty with these processes when it comes to learning from informational text are c...

Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison

“…Research by Wiley and Voss (1999) has shown that students who wrote arguments rather than narratives gained a deeper conceptual and causal understanding of the subject matter. Armbruster, Anderson, and Meyer (1991) showed that teaching less competent readers to find the structure in a document improved their general comprehension. Our findings and the reviewed studies suggest the need for systematic training in fostering epistemic reasoning skills.…”

Küreselleşen dünyada eğitim

“…Alanyazındaki araştırmalar incelendiğinde içerik, deneyim, eğitim, genel entelektüel beceriler gibi durumlarla ölçülen öğretmen niteliğinin öğrenci başarısı ile güçlü bir şekilde ilişkili olduğu görülmektedir (Anderson, 1991;Darling-Hammond, 2000;Fakeye, 2012;Goe, 2007;Greenwald, Hariss ve Sass, 2008;Hedges ve Laine, 1996). Bu nedenle öğretmen niteliğini oluşturan sınıftaki öğretim uygulamalarının ve niteliklerinin öğrenci başarısına etki eden iki önemli faktör olduğu söylenebilir.…”

“…Ayrıca bilgilendirici metinler kendine has metin yapıları içermektedir. Bunlar tanımlama, kronolojik sıralama, karşılaştırma ve kıyaslama, problem çözme ve sebep-sonuç yapılarıdır (Armbruster, Anderson ve Ostertag, 1991). Bu metinlerin öğretimi esnasında bu yapılara vurgu yapılması anlamanın gelişmesini sağlamaktadır (Akhondi, Malayeri ve Samad, 2011;Baştuğ ve Keskin, 2011).…”

The Effect of Summarization Instructional Strategies and Presentation Formats on the Outcomes of Historical Argumentative Reasoning

“…According to Kang (2004) graphic organizer can help students to get, to explain and to communicate information, and they can visualize concepts. Graphic organizer can help students to understand social studies texts mainly recall and recognition (Armbruster et al, 1991). Graphic organi z e r c a n e n h a n c e m a t h l e a r n i n g (Braselton & Decker, 1994).…”