Donna E. Alvermann

The Compensatory Effect of Graphic Organizers on Descriptive Text.

AbstractThe study investigated the use of graphic organizers to compensate for text that was less than optimal in its organization. Tenth graders (N = 114) read two versions of an expository passage that differed only in structure (comparison versus description). Both experimental groups studied a graphic organizer that had been constructed to reflect the comparison text structure. On immediate and delayed recall measures, the experimental groups recalled significantly more than the control groups only under the descriptive text condition. Results support assimilation encoding theory and suggest that organizers aid recall when readers must reorganize information but do not help when reorganization is unnecessary. All students, regardless of reading level, benefited from the use of graphic organizers.

Comprehension of Counterintuitive Science Text: Effects of Prior Knowledge and Text Structure.

AbstractThis study examined the effects of activating prior knowledge and refutation text structure on students’ comprehension of counterintuitive science material. Developmental studies students, who also were incompetent readers, either read a passage that referred directly to their known misconceptions about a science topic and then refuted those misconceptions, or they read a passage that only described the topic. Text structure was crossed with three levels of prior knowledge activation (augmented activation, activation only, and no activation). We found statistically significant differences that favored augmented activation over activation only and no activation over activation only. Additionally, the students favored refutation text over nonrefutation text. Implications are drawn for future research and developmental studies instruction.

On writing qualitative research

The authors explore the challenges of conducting and writing up qualitative research studies, and discuss four key issues: problems in distinguishing between levels of theory; holistic and microlevel issues in methodology; crises in representation and legitimation; and differences in the writing and write-up process.

Classroom Discussion of Content Area Reading Assignments: An Intervention Study.

THE AIM OF this study was to examine discussions of assigned readings in content area classrooms at the high school level, and to attempt modifications of these discussions so they would reflect more higher-order thinking and critical reading. The 6-month intervention study began with observation and analysis of existing discussion patterns in five classrooms in the Southeastern United States, focusing on the types of references teachers and students made to the texts they discussed (e.g., literal retellings, inferences, etc.). These five teachers, the authors of the study, and two research assistants then cooperated in planning instruction aimed at modifying the kinds of verbal exchanges between teachers and students, and among students. Videotaped discussions, field notes, teacher-student conferences, and student questionnaires were analyzed. Although teachers and students exhibited a marked stability in their verbal exchange patterns, there were changes in the types of references they made to the materials they were reading. All of the teachers whose goal was to elicit from students more inferential responses in discussing a text achieved that goal, even though they did not effect substantial and lasting changes in classroom interaction patterns.

Effects of Prior Knowledge Activation Modes and Text Structure on Nonscience Majors’ Comprehension of Physics

AbstractOur purpose in this study was to investigate a pragmatic, low-cost way to enhance student learning of complex science concepts without totally revamping texts or methods of instruction. Undergraduate nonscience majors (N = 62) with known naive conceptions about projectile motion were randomly assigned to one of six groups formed from three levels of a prior knowledge activation activity and two levels of text. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed that activating competent readers’ naive conceptions about a complex science concept is not as effective a means for dispelling inaccurate information as is the practice of activating their naive conceptions and then explicitly directing them to read and attend to ideas that might differ from their own. This result and the no difference found for refutation text are discussed within the context of earlier work and Kintsch’s (1980) observation that incongruity leads to new learning.

Effects of Interactive Discussion and Text Type on Learning Counterintuitive Science Concepts

Abstract The possibility that students can learn counterintuitive science concepts as the result of reading and then discussing ideas within a social context was examined in this study. Students read one of two texts, narrative and expository, that taught students Newtonian principles related to projectile motion. After reading, they (a) answered questions about ideas in the text, (b) participated in a scaffolded discussion with another student and a researcher to answer the same questions, or (c) participated in a control activity. Students who read expository text and students who participated in scaffolded discussion performed better on posttests than did those who read narrative and participated in question/answer sessions. Students who answered questions after reading had inappropriate search strategies, and they twisted information to make it consistent with their own nonscientific understandings. Students who discussed the text evidenced the same behaviors; however, the scaffolded discussion helped...

Interrupting Gendered Discursive Practices in Classroom Talk About Texts: Easy To Think About, Difficult To Do.

This study focused on us — a group of university — and school-based teacher researchers and observers — as we attempted to alter or interrupt certain gendered discursive practices that threatened to reproduce some of the same inequities in classroom talk about texts that we had noted in the past, but had not challenged. A feminist theoretical framework guided our use of gender as a lens for examining how particular power relations operating in our classrooms governed how students interacted in their discussions of assigned subject-matter texts. Fieldnotes, transcripts of videotaped text-based discussions, and interviews with students were collected in a graduate-level content-literacy class, a 7th-grade language arts class, and an 8th-grade language arts class. Transcripts of weekly research meetings and narrative vignettes that summarized a series of observations and interviews resulted in multiple layers of data. The findings reported from analyzing these data focus on 4 types of interactions: self-deprecating, discriminatory, and exclusionary talk; and talk that reflected our desire for teacher neutrality. Narrative analyses were used to reveal the difficulties we encountered in understanding and interpreting gendered discursive practices and the insights we gained from studying ourselves.

A Classroom Training Study: The Effects of Graphic Organizer Instruction on Fourth Graders' Comprehension.

Abstract Children in two fourth‐grade classrooms (N = 38) participated in a three‐month training study to test the effectiveness of the graphic organizer as a strategy for facilitating comprehension and retention of information in their social studies text. During the training phrase, students in the experimental group received instruction and practice three times a week in the use of organizers to help them remember what they read. Frequent multiple‐choice and free recall tests provided them with opportunities to demonstrate what they had learned. Students in the control group received the same number of instructional contact hours, read the same material, and took the same tests as the experimental subjects, but were denied exposure to graphic organizers. On a post‐training test passage, students in the graphic organizer group recalled significantly more of the total number of idea units than students in the control group for each of two times: immediately after reading the passage and 48 hours later. N...

Telling Themselves Who They Are: What One Out-of-School Time Study Revealed about Underachieving Readers.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether or not adolescents who are deemed underachievers and who struggle to read school-assigned textbooks will engage with popular culture texts of their own choosing (e.g., magazines, comics, TV, video games, music CDs, graffiti, e-mail, and other Internet-mediated texts). The 60 student participants, who were enrolled in grades 7–9 in a small city school district in the southeastern U.S., self-identified mostly as not being interested in reading. Thirty attended weekly meetings of an out-of-school time media club and kept a daily out-of-school time activity log for 14 weeks (the intervention group); the other 30 were assigned to a comparison group and did not attend the weekly media club meetings but did keep a daily out-of-school time activity log for the same 14-week period. Independent t-tests applied to data from the daily activity logs revealed several interesting contrasts between the two groups. One unexpected finding was the relatively large amount of time that participants in both groups reported they spent reading outside of school.

Media, Information Communication Technologies, and Youth Literacies A Cultural Studies Perspective

Everyday literacy practices are changing at an unprecedented pace, and speculation as to the impact of media and interactive communication technologies on current conceptions of youth’s reading, writing, and viewing is evident on many fronts. The implications of this for teacher educators and classroom teachers are discussed.