Taffy E. Raphael

Heightening Fourth-Grade Students' Sensitivity to Sources of Information for Answering Comprehension Questions.

THIS STUDY consisted of two experiments training fourth-grade students to recognize the relationship between comprehension questions and answer sources. In the first experiment, students who received four days of instruction about sources of information for answering comprehension questions did not differ from untrained control group students on three dependent measures. In the second experiment, the length of instruction was extended and conducted by teachers during their reading classes. Four teachers participated in two levels of training, a traditional half-day teacher workshop, or the half-day workshop supplemented by instructional materials and weekly monitoring by researchers with feedback. Six additional teachers did not receive any training, though their students participated in either a practice control group or a no treatment control group. When both trained and control group students were tested on the three dependent measures, significant effects for ability and question types were revealed in predicted directions. Performance of high ability students was superior to average and both were superior to low; performance on text based questions was higher than that on knowledge based questions. Both groups of trained students were generally superior to control groups in their quality of responses.

Metacognition, Instruction, and the Role of Questioning Activities

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.

Discretion in the Translation of Research to Policy: A Case From Beginning Reading

Today, when information spreads like wild fire through the media and across the Web, we argue that the standards for reporting and interpreting educational research should be raised. The need for a higher standard is urgent in fields such as beginning reading, in which public interest is intense, because findings can quickly become distorted or misinterpreted and enshrined through misinformed policy decisions. Researchers investigating beginning reading should exercise extra caution to delimit findings from their own studies. They should take special pains to show how studies contribute to a larger picture of literacy development which policymakers and educational leaders, in turn, need to consider. We examine one recent, and uncommonly influential, reading methods study as an example of research that has been overly promoted by the media and misused by some policymakers and educational leaders to support a simple solution to the complex problem of raising the literacy of young children in high-poverty neighborhoods.