Margaret G. McKeown

Increasing Young Low‐Income Children’s Oral Vocabulary Repertoires through Rich and Focused Instruction

This article reports on 2 studies with kindergarten and first‐grade children from a low‐achieving elementary school that provided vocabulary instruction by the students’ regular classroom teacher of sophisticated words (advanced vocabulary words) from children’s trade books that are typically read aloud. Study 1 compared the number of sophisticated words learned between 52 children who were directly taught the words and 46 children who received no instruction. As expected, children in the experimental group learned significantly more words. Study 2, a within‐subject design, examined 76 children’s learning of words under 2 different amounts of instruction, either 3 days or 6 days. In Study 2, the vocabulary gains in kindergarten and first‐grade children for words that received more instruction were twice as large. Student vocabulary was assessed by a picture test where students were presented with pictures that represented different words and were asked to identify which picture represented the word that the tester provided. The verbal test was similar but used a sentence description of a scenario instead of a picture. The instructional implications for which words to teach and how to teach them to young children are discussed.

Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches.

A BSTRA C T Reports from research and the larger educational community demonstrate that too many students have limited ability to comprehend texts. The research reported here involved a two-year study in which standardized comprehension instruction for representations of two major approaches was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the two experimental comprehension instructional approaches (content and strategies) and a control approach were compared. Content instruction focused student attention on the content of the text through open, meaning-based questions about the text. In strategies instruction, students were taught specific procedures to guide their access to text during reading of the text. Lessons for the control approach were developed using questions available in the teacher’s edition of the basal reading program used in the participating classrooms. Student participants were all fifth graders in a low-performing urban district. In addition to assessments of comprehension of lesson texts and an analysis of lesson discourse, three assessments were developed to compare student ability to transfer knowledge gained. The results were consistent from Year 1 to Year 2. No differences were seen on one measure of lesson-text comprehension, the sentence verification technique. However, for narrative recall and expository learning probes, content students outperformed strategies students, and occasionally, the basal control students outperformed strategies students. For one of the transfer assessments, there was a modest effect in favor of the content students. Transcripts of the lessons were examined, and differences in amount of talk about the text and length of student response also favored the content approach.

THE EFFECTS OF LONG-TERM VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION ON READING COMPREHENSION: A REPLICATION

A study that investigated the relationship between vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension was replicated and extended. The original study showed substantial gains in accuracy of word knowledge and speed of lexical access, but only marginal gains in comprehension. This latter result was attributable to methodological problems, and thus the comprehension measure was revised. In the present study, fourth graders were taught 104 words over a five-month period. Following instruction, these children and a group of uninstructed children matched on pre-instruction vocabulary and comprehension ability performed tasks to measure accuracy of word knowledge, speed of lexical access, and comprehension of stories containing taught words. Instructed children showed substantial advantage in all tasks. Reasons for these results, in contrast to studies that have failed to improve comprehension through vocabulary instruction, are discussed.

Questioning the Author: A Yearlong Classroom Implementation to Engage Students with Text

This article describes the development and implementation of Questioning the Author, an instructional intervention that focuses on having students grapple with and reflect on what an author is trying to say in order to build a representation from it. The implementation involved a social studies teacher, a reading/language arts teacher, and their 23 inner-city fourth-grade students in a small parochial school. Analyses of transcripts of videotaped lessons and classroom observations revealed that teacher talk decreased in quantity and increased in quality with more emphasis on questions focused on constructing and extending meaning and more skill in refining and using students comments in discussion. Changes in the content of student talk were also documented. These included an increase in the number and complexity of student-initiated questions and evidence of the development of student collaboration. Teachers journal entries and students responses in interviews provided insights about their views of the implementation.

The Assessment and Characterization of Young Learners’ Knowledge of a Topic in History

Current research on learners’ background knowledge has demonstrated how variations in the extent and quality of that knowledge affect learning. This paper focuses on the background knowledge that young learners bring to their study of history by characterizing students’ knowledge of events leading to the American Revolution just before and a year after they study the topic in school. The characterization of student knowledge is based on patterns of responses to interviews and on the construction of semantic nets that illustrate patterns of individual students. Results suggest that knowledge of students both before and after instruction is characterized by simple associations and a lack of connected structures.

The Nature of Engaged Reading in Classroom Discussions of Literature

The goal of this investigation was to gain an understanding of engagement as fourth graders and their teachers attempted to construct meaningful interpretations during classroom discussions of literature. Data from videotaped discussion, field notes, and interviews with students and teachers were analyzed inductively. Engagement occurred when students and teachers used interpretive tools to select, connect, and organize information in the text to construct meaningful interpretations. The context of the literary act and the culture of the classroom influenced engaged reading. There were cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational components to the engagement observed.

Inviting Students Into the Pursuit of Meaning

This article describes the basis of Questioning the Author, an approach to encourage students to engage with text ideas. The article begins with a description of what motivated us to design the approach, which was based on a series of studies conducted in the 1980s that provided a revealing look at how young readers interact with the ideas in their textbooks. We observed that students tended to resist grappling with text ideas, but rather dealt with text at a surface level. We hypothesized that students could be encouraged to consider text ideas if the reading situation was set up as a dialogue with a texts author—thus our notion of Questioning the Author. Examples of how Questioning the Author functions in classrooms are provided. A summary of findings from implementations of Questioning the Author are presented in terms of changes in the roles of both teachers and students in classroom discussion.

Learning Vocabulary Different Ways for Different Goals

Although no best method of vocabulary instruction has been identified, certain features have been recognized as characterizing vocabulary instruction that improves comprehension. These features include multiple exposures to words in various contexts and engaging students in active thinking about word meanings. In this article, effects of a vocabulary instructional program containing these features are discussed and compared with instruction that offers only definitional information. The design of a vocabulary program for intermediate grades is then discussed. The emphasis here is that activities developed depend on the goal of instruction, the nature of the words taught, and the characteristics of the learners.

Toward Meaningful Accounts in History Texts for Young Learners

This examination of instructional sequences from four 5th-grade textbook series treatments of the American Revolution is the center-piece of a larger in-depth analysis of content and presentation of commercial social studies programs for elementary grades. Our work has drawn on cognitive research on comprehension and learning in order to bring into focus issues of learning that have direct bearing on textbook content and organization. Our analysis uncovered lack of clarity in the relation between the content presented and the instructional goals, assumption of an unrealistic variety and depth of background knowledge, and inadequate explanation of significant events and their relationships. An approach to improving instruction is embedded in the examination of the texts coverage of the chain of events leading to the American Revolution.

Effects of a Supplemental Vocabulary Program on Word Knowledge and Passage Comprehension

Abstract A cluster randomized trial estimated the effects of a supplemental vocabulary program, Elements of Reading®: vocabulary on student vocabulary and passage comprehension in moderate- to high-poverty elementary schools. Forty-four schools participated over a period spanning 2 consecutive school years. At baseline, 1,057 teachers and 16,471 students from kindergarten, first, third, and fourth grade participated. The schools were randomly assigned to either the primary or intermediate grade treatment group. In each group, the nontreatment classrooms provided the control condition. Treatment classrooms used the intervention to supplement their core reading program, whereas control classrooms taught vocabulary business-as-usual. The intervention includes structured, weekly lesson plans for 6 to 8 literary words and aural/oral and written language activities providing multiple exposures and opportunity for use. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to estimate both proximal (Year 1) and distal (Year 2) effects on vocabulary and passage comprehension. The intervention had positive and statistically significant proximal effects but no statistically significant distal effects. The results indicate that the intervention can improve targeted vocabulary and local passage comprehension, but expecting global effects may be overly optimistic.