Reading in the Classroom: Systems for the Observation of Teaching and Learning - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557666512 ISBN 13: 9781557666512

Verlag: BROOKES PUB, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

• Helps schools choose the best systems for assessing outcomes and pinpointing methods that aren't working — goals that are more important than ever in light of No Child Left Behind's focus on improving school performance and implementing statewide accountability systems.



• Covers timely topics in literacy instruction — teaching English language learners, expanding professional development opportunities, improving education for students with learning disabilities, and more.

The best way to pinpoint what works and doesn't work in reading instruction is classroom observation — and this text will help educational stakeholders choose from available observation systems or design their own system. Each of the nine field-tested systems discussed has a different focus, such as assessing the effectiveness of early reading instruction for English language learners, assessing and improving the writing performance of students who struggle, and reviewing school-wide literacy outcomes and determining professional development needs. Each chapter explores the system's development; details its field testing, reliability, and validity; examines its strengths and limitations; and may include the actual tool discussed. With this invaluable book, researchers, teachers, and decision-makers will explore observational systems that give them the best possible understanding of which approaches to reading instruction are working — and what kind of work still needs to be done.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., H.E. Hartfelder/Southland Corp. Regents Chair in Human Development and Executive Director, The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, University of Texas at Austin, Sanchez Building, 1912 Speedway, Austin, Texas 78712

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of The Meadows Center, an organized research unit at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of the American Education Research Association Special Interest Group Distinguished Researcher Award, the International Reading Association Albert J. Harris Award, the University of Texas Distinguished Faculty Award, and the Jeannette E. Fleischner Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Learning Disabilities from the Council for Exceptional Children. She is the author of more than 35 books and 250 research articles. Vaughn is currently the principal investigator on several research grants from the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Kerri L. Briggs, Ph.D., is Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. In this capacity, Dr. Briggs contributes to the implementation of efforts associated with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (PL 107-110). Prior to that, she was Director of Evaluation at the Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts at The University of Texas. She has co-authored several journal articles and book chapters about reading, school-based management, leadership, and charter schools.

Barbara R. Foorman, Ph.D., earned her doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley. She is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School and Principal Investigator of the grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Early Interventions for Children with Reading Problems. In addition to many chapters and journal articles on topics related to language and reading development, she is the editor of Reading Acquisition: Cultural Constraints and Cognitive Universals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). She is on the editorial board of Journal of Learning Disabilities and has guest edited special issues of Scientific Studies of Reading, Linguistics and Education and Journal of Learning Disabilities. Dr. Foorman has been actively involved in outreach to the schools and to the general public, having chaired Houston Independent School District's Committee on a Balanced Approach to Reading and having testified before the California and Texas legislatures and the Texas Board of Education Long-Range Planning Committee. Dr. Foorman is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE), and several local reading efforts.

Dr. Greenwood is the Director of the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project and Professor of Applied Behavioral Science at the University of Kansas. He is a founding author of progress monitoring measures for infants and toddlers and editor of School-Wide Prevention Models: Lessons Learned in Elementary Schools (Guilford Press, 2008). He is co-principal investigator of the Center for Response to Intervention in Early Childhood (CRTIEC). He has more than 100 publications in peerreviewed journals to his credit. Under his leadership, the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project was awarded the 1996 research award of the Council for Exceptional Children for its contributions to interventions for children with special needs. He was the recipient of the 2009 Higuchi Research Achievement Award in Applied Science at the University of Kansas.

Diane Haager, Ph.D., is a researcher and teacher educator in reading and learning disabilities. She is a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, where she instructs special education teachers and graduate students. Dr. Haager has worked in public schools and clinics as a reading specialist and special educator. She has had extensive experience working with English language learners who have reading difficulties. She has written numerous book chapters and research articles. Her research interests include issues related to effective reading instruction for English language learners, students with learning disabilities, and students at risk for reading failure. She is the co-editor of Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, a journal for researchers and practitioners. Dr. Haager has directed several projects focusing on reading intervention for struggling readers in urban schools. She serves as a consultant and provides professional development for schools, districts, research projects, and state education leaders regarding reading instruction, reading intervention, and response to intervention.

In addition to his work at the Instructional Research Group, Dr. Gersten is also a professor emeritus in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. He is the director of the Math Strand for the Center on Instruction, the director of research for the Regional Educational Laboratory-South West, and the principal investigator for several What Works Clearinghouse projects. As Project Director of the Teacher Quality Distribution and Measurement Study, Dr. Gersten is currently working with a team of researchers from Harvard University to revise a mathematics observation measure that will be used to determine the effect of professional development on teachers' mathematics instruction. He is also a coauthor of a mathematics screening and progress monitoring measure for kindergarten and first-grade students that is in press. His main areas of expertise include evaluation methodology and instructional research on students with learning disabilities, mathematics, and reading comprehension. Dr. Gersten has conducted numerous randomized trials, many of which have been published in major scientific journals in the field. He has either directed or codirected 42 applied research grants addressing a wide array of issues in education and has been a recipient of many federal and nonfederal grants (more than $20 million). He has advised on a variety of reading and mathematics projects using randomized trials in education settings and has written extensively about the importance of randomized trials in special education research.

In 2002, Dr. Gersten received the Distinguished Special Education Researcher Award from the American Educational Research Association's Special Education Research Division. He served as a member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, a Presidential committee to develop researchbased policy in mathematics for American schools. Dr. Gersten also chaired the Panel that developed A Practice Guide on Response to Intervention in Mathematics for the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

Beth Harry, Ph.D., is a professor of special education at the University of Miami in Florida. A native of Jamaica, Beth graduated from St. Andrew High School in 1962 and went on to pursue her bachelor of arts and master's degrees at the University of Toronto and her doctorate at Syracuse University. Beth has been a teacher all of her adult life, including teaching English at the secondary and community college levels and special education at all levels. Beth's current work focuses on teaching and research related to disability, multicultural, and family issues. She lived in Trinidad for 12 years, where both her children—Melanie and Mark Teelucksingh—were born.

Robert M. Gagne Professor of Psychology and Education and Director, Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University, 227 North Bronough Street, Suite 7250, Tallahassee, FL 32301. Dr. Torgesen’s research interests include instructional methods for the prevention and remediation of reading disabilities and assessment practices for the early identification of children at risk for reading difficulties.

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Excerpted from chapter 1 Reading in the Classroom: Systems for the Observation of Teaching and Learning, edited by Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., & Kerri L. Briggs, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2003 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Measurement of Teaching Practices During Reading/Language Arts Instruction and Its Relationship to Student Achievement

Reading initiatives at local, state, and national levels in the United States call for scientifically based reading instruction. Several consensus documents agree about what the content of this instruction should be — the National Research Council's Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), the Primary Literacy Standards (New Standards, 1999), and the report of the National Reading Panel (2000). All of these documents agree on the importance of explicit instruction in the alphabet principle, integrated with reading for meaning and opportunities to learn. Specifically, this includes all support instruction that builds phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding skills, fluency in word recognition and text processing, construction of meaning, vocabulary, spelling, and writing skills (Foorman & Torgesen, 2001). But beyond agreement on the content of scientifically based reading instruction, little agreement exists regarding the implementation of this instruction. We cannot answer such basic questions as, "What does good reading instruction look like? How much time should teachers spend in different reading/language arts activities in order to maximize student outcomes? How much of good teaching is a matter of teacher knowledge, classroom management, or student engagement?"

To answer these questions, we reviewed the literature on classroom observation instruments and began to pilot our own instruments in a longitudinal investigation of the conditions under which children learn to read. The investigation followed approximately 1,400 children (98% of whom were African American) in kindergarten through fourth grade; these children were in 112 classrooms in 17 high-poverty schools in Houston and Washington, D.C. The literature review and longitudinal investigation reveal much. In this chapter, we review the literature on existing instruments for observing reading/language arts instruction, describe the classroom observational instruments we developed, and provide preliminary descriptions of how these measures of classroom behaviors relate to student outcomes.

OBSERVATIONAL SYSTEMS FOR CLASSROOM READING INSTRUCTION

Classroom observational systems range widely from descriptive frameworks and narrative descriptions to coding of teacher–student communication and time-sampling of discrete behaviors. An example of a descriptive framework is the Reading Lesson Observation Framework (RLOF; Henk, Moore, Marinak, & Tomasetti, 2000). The RLOF consists of a set of expectations for teaching behaviors during reading/language arts instruction time. Thus, the RLOF serves as a tool that district supervisors can use to align teaching behaviors with district philosophy. The instrument consists of seven domains with 5–11 indicators in each. The seven domains are classroom climate, prereading phase, guided reading phase, postreading phase, skill and strategy instruction, materials and tasks of the lesson, and teacher practices. Responses are recorded in one of four ways: observed and of satisfactory quality, observed and of very high quality, either not observed or of unsatisfactory quality, and not applicable. No inter-rater reliability for the RLOF was provided by Henk and colleagues (2000).

There are many qualitative approaches to conducting classroom observations (Wolcott, 1988). One method, adopted by Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Mistretta-Hampston, and Echevarria (1998), uses a grounded- theory approach to identify common elements of literacy instruction in six fourth-grade and sixth-grade classrooms. Consistent with this approach, data collection and analysis in Pressley and colleagues' study occurred simultaneously. Data consisted of field notes from classroom observations, interviews with the teachers, and classroom artifacts. During classroom observations, student engagement was calculated every 10–15 minutes as the proportion of students who appeared to be engaged productively in academic work. Validity and reliability were ensured by "triangulation of data, methods, and investigators" by collecting data across classrooms, by observing and interviewing, and by comparing inter-rater reliability across two investigators (Pressley et al., 1998, p. 169). Validity, or credibility, of data was further triangulated by negative-case analysis (i.e., looking for disconfirming data), prolonged engagement (i.e., having observers spend the majority of the school year in the classroom), and member checking (i.e., presenting data summaries to the teachers for verification). In this study, classrooms were found to be similar in the combination of authentic reading and writing experiences and explicit skills instruction. Classrooms differed with respect to methods and materials and whether important instructional elements were omitted, such as instruction in comprehension strategies or self-regulation.

Time-sampling approaches gained recognition as classroom observational techniques with Stallings, Robbins, and Presbrey's (1986) finding that time-on-task predicted achievement. Allington and McGill-Franzen (1989) took the utility of the time-on-task variable a step further by showing that disadvantaged, low-achieving students were better served through general education (via what was then called Chapter 1 and is now called Title I funding) than through special education. Specifically, students served through Chapter 1 received significantly more time per day (i.e., 35 minutes) in reading/language arts instruction than their peers in resource rooms, and the quality of instruction was better. No student outcome data, however, were provided. Allington and McGill-Franzen's (1989) student observation instrument required observers to code a number of instructional setting variables and note the clock time for transitions to new settings. Overall reliability during the 3-day training period was 86%.

An observational system that goes beyond reading/language arts instruction is the Ecobehavioral Assessment Systems Software (EBASS; Greenwood, Carta, Kamps, & Delquadri, 1995). The EBASS consists of three instruments: 1) CISSAR (Code for Instructional Structure and Student Academic Response), which is for observing general education kindergarten through twelfth-grade classrooms; 2) MS-CISSAR (the mainstream version of CISSAR), which is for observing children with special needs in any school setting; and 3) ESCAPE (Ecobehavioral System for Complex Assessments of Preschool Environments), which is for observing preschool- and kindergarten-age children with or without special needs. Each instrument has been validated and used in published research (e.g., Greenwood & Delquadri, 1988). EBASS runs on a laptop computer and prompts the observer to record events every 10 seconds. Each instrument contains student, teacher, and ecology categories. Student behavior is further categorized into academic responses or competing, nonacademic responses and task management behaviors. Academic responses consist of writing, playing an academic game, reading aloud, reading silently, academic talking, answering an academic question, and asking an academic question. Task management behaviors that support academic responding are attending to a task, raising a hand or signaling for help, looking for materials, moving to a new academic station, and playing appropriately. Teacher behaviors are...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BROOKES PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1557666512
• ISBN 13: 9781557666512
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 300
• Herausgeber: Vaughn Sharon, Briggs Kerri
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar