Stuart McNaughton

Sustained Acceleration of Achievement in Reading Comprehension: The New Zealand Experience

Schools with primarily indigenous and ethnic minorities in low socioeconomic areas have long been associated with low levels of achievement, particularly in literacy. This is true for New Zealand despite high levels of reading comprehension by international comparisons (e.g., PISA). Recent reviews of schooling improvement suggest small gains over the short term are possible with well-designed interventions, but for children in the middle primary school years, the criterion against which effective interventions need to be judged is sustained and systematic acceleration across levels of achievement in order to achieve equitable distributions of achievement. Plotting gains across time is also needed to examine whether “summer effects” can be overcome. The present quasi-experimental design study was a three-year research and development collaboration among schools, government, and researchers to raise reading comprehension through critical discussions of achievement and teacher observation data and linking research on effective comprehension practices to specific needs. The collaboration resulted in increased rates of achievement that were variable but sustained across three years. The growth model showed a step-like pattern with rapid gains over school months and a plateau over summer. Over three years this represented an average achievement gain across cohorts followed longitudinally of one year’s progress in addition to expected progress over that period with stanine effect sizes of d = 0.62. The results show the significance of testing effects against the criterion of sustained and systematic achievement and the need to examine growth over multiple calendar years to better represent the pattern of gains.

Managing the Mismatch: Enhancing Early Literacy Progress for Children With Diverse Language and Cultural Identities in Mainstream Urban Schools in New Zealand

Despite New Zealands reputation in literacy instruction, a major achievement gap has been identified for minority Maori and Pacific Islands children in poor schools. An intervention through professional development of teachers modified instructional practices in beginning literacy instruction. The intervention involved 72 teachers from 12 schools who focused on children in the 1st 6 months of schools. A mixed longitudinal and cross-sectional design was used to examine the effects of the intervention on the language and literacy of 344 children across the age range of 5.0-6.0 years. The children in these schools made accelerated progress and gained higher levels of achievement across a broad band of measures compared with matched cohort groups. It is possible to raise achievement for minority children in schools serving low socioeconomic communities to near national levels.

Delayed versus Immediate Attention to Oral Reading Errors: effects on accuracy and self‐correction

ABSTRACT Teacher attention to oral reading errors often occurs during early reading instruction. Six average second‐year readers received either delayed or immediate attention to oral reading errors when reading familiar texts from a graded series. Both accuracy and self‐correction were lower during phases of immediate attention to errors. These effects were also evident in childrens reading of a series of unfamiliar texts. The more difficult texts were introduced concurrently with the graded series, but were read without any teacher instruction. Results are interpreted in terms of the interference with self‐regulated reading by immediate teacher attention.

Testing the effectiveness of an intervention model based on data use: a replication series across clusters of schools

Intervention models based on data use can be effective in raising student achievement. This article presents 3 studies of one such model which had reported improved reading comprehension levels in 7 poor urban multicultural schools serving indigenous and ethnic minority communities. The intervention (the Learning Schools Model) used a process comprising critical discussions of achievement and teacher observation data to develop specific and contextualized content for fine-tune instruction. The reliability and generality of the effects of the model were tested in a cluster of “like” schools and a cluster of “unlike” schools. The growth models showed similar effects to the original schools, with gains of between 3 to 4 months additional progress per year over 3 years. The replications show that models that use data to design local program content can be reliably and generally effective, but also there is a need to examine differential effects.

Bilingual and Biliteracy Development Over the Transition to School

This paper examines the bilingual and bilteracy development of a group of children from Samoan and Tongan families over the transition to mainstream Englishmedium schools in New Zealand. The children attended Pasifika Early Childhood Education Centres in Auckland, New Zealand, which provided full immersion programmes in their L1 (either Samoan or Tongan). Development in a home language (L1) and in English (L2) was plotted over the six months prior to going to school and over the first year at an English-medium school in a programme with known features for effective teaching of early reading and writing in English. Before going to school (at 5.0 years), the children were developing as incipient bilinguals. An incipient biliteracy paralleled their bilingual development, although there were large variations in profiles on entry to school. After one month at school, there were indicators of faster progress in English and a slowing down of progress in L1, which was dramatically confirmed by the results at the end of the first year. The rapid growth of literacy and comprehension knowledge in English from 5.0 to 6.0 years reflected the effectiveness of the school programme. However, the resultant patterns suggested children were now ‘at risk bilinguals’. The relationships between literacy in two languages weakened over the first year, suggesting the possible transfer effects from one set of literacy skills to another appeared to happen very quickly on entry to school.

Co-Constructing Expertise: The Development of Parents’ and Teachers’ Ideas about Literacy Practices and the Transition to School

Going to school creates a developmental transition during which new ways of teaching and learning take place and new forms of expertise emerge. This article discusses properties of effective transitions for children in diverse urban schools. A model of socialization is used to explore one component of effective transitions, the ideas that family members and teachers have about teaching, learning and literacy. Studies of literacy over the transition to school are used to show how the development of shared ideas can contribute to more effective transitions for children from diverse language and cultural communities.

A model of school change for culturally and linguistically diverse students in New Zealand: a summary and evidence from systematic replication

A model of school change has been designed and implemented in a systematic replication series. Key principles are: that teachers need to be able to act as adaptive experts; that local evidence about teaching and learning is necessary to inform instructional design; that school professional learning communities are vehicles for changing teaching practice; that educative research–practice–policy partnerships are needed to solve problems; that instructional leadership in schools is necessary for community functioning and for coherence; and that effective programmes in schools are built by fine tuning existing practices. A three‐stage model has been tested across three clusters of schools: two groups of urban schools serving Māori and Pasifika children from low socio‐economic status communities and a third group comprising all the primary schools in a rural and remote region of New Zealand. The model has been extended to different academic areas (writing as well as reading) and to secondary schools since its initial testing. Evidence is provided for effectiveness for Māori and Pasifika children in urban schools and Māori students in rural and remote schools.

Te Kohanga Reo Hei Tikanga Ako i te Reo Maori: Te Kohanga Reo as a context for language learning

Abstract Te Kohanga Reo is an indigenous educational intervention aiming to recover Maori language usage; a need anticipated in early research by Clay (1968). This paper argues that understanding the effectiveness of Te Kohanga Reo for language development and for classroom discourse requires two things. Firstly, a theoretical framework which enables language acquisition to be seen as culturally contextualised and secondly research strategies that enable cultural contexts to be understood. A study of language use in Te Kohanga Reo provides evidence for how language use and processes of acquisition express and construct cultural meanings.

Profiling Teaching and Learning Needs in Beginning Literacy Instruction: The Case of Children in “Low Decile” Schools in New Zealand

Children in low decile schools in New Zealand, most of whom are from Maori and Pacific Islands families achieve significantly lower levels in school reading and writing than other children. Claims have been made about their learning needs. This paper argues that, among other sources of information, decisions about effective teaching should be based on knowledge of childrens development under particular instructional conditions. This paper examines the rates and levels of learning particular components of reading and writing over the first year of literacy instruction. A cross sectional design was used to establish profiles from 346 children (5.0-year-olds, n =111; 5.6-year-olds, n = 135; 6.0-year-olds, n =100) in 12 schools in South Auckland, New Zealand. Despite low entry levels in conventional literacy knowledge and receptive and expressive English language skills, children made nationally expected progress in letter and phonological knowledge. Markedly lower than expected progress occurred for word recognition, writing words, and text reading. The profiles indicate that effective literacy instruction needs to enhance the understanding of and production of texts through early and focussed instruction.

Analysis and Discussion of Classroom and Achievement Data to Raise Student Achievement

In New Zealand, there is evidence that analysing data in teams can lead to improvements in student achievement. In this country, data discussions in professional learning communities were an important component of research and development interventions in three clusters of schools (n = 48 schools). These interventions significantly improved student achievement over 3 years, and these achievement gains were sustained after the interventions. In this chapter, the authors focus on a central feature of these data discussions, understanding classroom instruction in relation to student achievement patterns. The importance of inter-dependence between schools and external experts, greater pedagogical content knowledge to link classroom instruction to achievement results and the creation and use of school artefacts (e.g., data analysis reports) to facilitate effective data use are also discussed.