Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
72
result(s) for
"Beck, Isabel L"
Sort by:
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.
Journal Article
Word Knowledge and Comprehension Effects of an Academic Vocabulary Intervention for Middle School Students
This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade reading teachers and 105 students (treatment n = 62; control n = 43) and in Year 2, one seventh-grade reading teacher and 87 students (treatment n = 44; control n = 43) from the same public school. In both years, results favored instructed students in word knowledge, lexical access, and morphological awareness on researcher-designed measures. In Year 2, small advances were also found for comprehension. Transcripts of lessons shed light on processes of developing representations of unfamiliar words.
Journal Article
Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches
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.
Journal Article
Text Talk: Capturing the Benefits of Read-Aloud Experiences for Young Children
Considers what the research literature suggests about the kinds of texts and kinds of talk that are most beneficial for read-aloud experiences. Provides an overview of Text Talk, an approach to read-alouds directed toward enhancing young children's ability to construct meaning. Includes examples of teacher/student interaction and suggests aspects of reading aloud that need attention. (SG)
Journal Article
In The Media: Expanding Students' Experience With Academic Vocabulary
How can we supplement the limited time available for vocabulary instruction while motivating students to attend to the words they are learning? As a part of an academic word vocabulary intervention, we challenged sixth‐grade students to find their words in the world around them. This activity, In the Media, garnered responses from 51 of the 61 students involved in the intervention. Analysis of students' reading comprehension achievement showed that it was not just high‐achieving students who responded; rather the full range of achievement was represented. Analysis of pretest and posttest data revealed that students who found more words had the highest gains in the final assessment. Examples of students' encounters and where they found them are discussed. These examples suggest that students developed flexible knowledge of their words, as they were able to find them in uses beyond those taught and in related forms that had not been introduced.
Journal Article
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 text's 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.
Journal Article
Transforming Knowledge into Professional Development Resources: Six Teachers Implement a Model of Teaching for Understanding Text
This article describes our attempts to transform knowledge from classroom implementations into resources, which we call Accessibles, to support teachers' implementation of Questioning the Author (QtA), an instructional approach aimed at building students' understanding of what they read. We developed 25 Accessibles, which are brief, single-issue documents available for teachers to use on their own. Each Accessible presents examples of classroom interactions and explicates how those interactions exemplify QtA issues or solutions to issues. In this article we report the results of a field test to document the effects of the Accessibles. 6 teachers implemented QtA in their classrooms in reading and social studies over 7 months. Transcripts of videotaped lessons, collected before the teachers began QtA, and QtA lesson transcripts were analyzed for patterns of classroom discourse interactions in terms of the kinds of questions asked, students' responses, and teachers' rejoinders to students. Results showed that use of the Accessibles changed classroom discourse from teacher dominated and focused on retrieving information to discourse shared by students and teacher and focused on building ideas from text. Interviews that probed teachers about their attitudes toward and use of the Accessibles indicated that the majority of the time teachers found the Accessibles useful. We also present teachers' comments about the Accessibles, which provide insight into aspects of the Accessibles that they found particularly helpful. Finally, we discuss themes underlying the Accessibles in terms of their potential for other approaches to teaching for understanding.
Journal Article
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. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article