Report: Enhanced teaching and learning of comprehension in Years 5–8: Otara schools

Stuart McNaughton, Mei Kuin Lai, Meaola Amituanai-Toloa, and Sasha Farry

http://www.tlri.org.nz/sites/default/files/projects/9220_summaryreport_0.pdf

baseline ‘profiles’ of achievement… low decoding levels were generally not a problem; rather, problems included low rates of checking and detecting threats to meaning in paragraph comprehension, and the size and knowledge of vocabulary, which we predicted were posing difficulties in reading comprehension. An unpredicted finding was that while high rates of explicit strategy instruction occurred, students were focused on the strategies as ends in themselves, and often resorted to guessing.

Classroom observations showed a low incidence of teachers or students monitoring and checking strategies, and low rates of identifying and elaborating meanings of low-frequency words, unusual uses of common words, or idiomatic uses.

Feedback, analysis, and problem solving

The first phase included systematic feedback, analysis, and problem solving at cluster, school, and classroom levels using the baseline profiles as evidence. This process occurred each year thereafter. A second phase added targeted professional development, based on the evidence in the first phase, with all the Year 4–8 teachers. The third phase involved planned sustainability of the professional learning communities, with teacher designed projects and a teacher-led conference.

Significant changes in types of teacher and student exchanges relating to the focus of the intervention were linked to the pattern of the gains over two years in the component tests

The conclusion from the Mangere study was that it is possible to develop more effective teaching that impacts directly on the reading comprehension achievement of Year 4–8 children in the culturally and linguistically diverse decile 1 schools of South Auckland. This second study, which added a further seven schools with approximately 1400 students, adds considerable weight to that conclusion.