Draft For Action Research Project Week 3 Assignment

This is a copy of my Draft for my Action Research Project in EDLD 5397

 

Week 3 Assignment, Part 3

Draft Action Research Project Progress Report

Improved Reading Comprehension Strategies and Skills for High School Students

Needs Assessment

For the needs assessment of my action research project,  I used data from the AEIS reports from the past several years, which included TAKS and STAAR-EOC scores, as well as ACT Reading and Accuplacer scores. Students struggle at all levels of reading on standardized testing as exemplified by these exams because of a decline in basic reading comprehension.  This is fed by a lack of exposure to expository texts that creates a limited working vocabulary.  Additionally, students are not aware of or equipped with skills or strategies to attack complex or dense texts.  Disaggregated TAKS and STAAR- EOC data, as well as ACT Reading and Accuplacer Reading scores, were divided into sub-groups as a part of my initial research. My goal is to find ways to improve the reading comprehension of students.  If this is accomplished, the scores will improve not only in reading, but also all other tests that contain reading questions.  When I sat down with my site supervisor, this was the one area that he felt we needed to make improvements in. As I have researched this problem, I realize it is not only a local problem for our school, but also for our country.  If we hope to have students be successful in the the future, educators must ensure that they have the tools to fully comprehend what they are reading, whether it be literary, expository, or technical in nature.

Objectives and Vision

My vision is that students will be exposed to expository, real-world texts through strategies that will be implementedas a part od curriculum in core classes that incorporate reading as a part of the lesssons.  Students will understand and apply strategies for comprehending difficult texts by learning to attack new, unusal, or unfamiliar words.  Students will learn strategies to increase comprehension, like re-reading, paraphrasing, notetaking, annotating and outlining as a part of close reading . Students will apply knowledge of Greek and Latin roots and affixes in attacking new words and learn to recognize and decode context clues as a part of reading comprehension. My goal is to implement several different strategies in the many of the core classrooms of our school to see if we can indeed improve reading comprehension through a school-wide approach to reading across the curriculum.

Review of  Literature and Action Research Strategy

Porter-O'Donnell, C. (2004). Beyond the yellow highlighter: Teaching annotation skills to improve reading comprehension. English Journal, 93(5), 82-89.

Ness, M. (2009). Reading comprehension strategies in secondary content area classrooms: Teacher use of and attitudes towards reading comprehension instruction. Reading Horizons, 49(2), 143-166.

McCallum, R. (2011). Improving reading comprehension of at-risk high-school students: The art of reading program. Psychology in the Schools , doi: 10.1002/pits 20541

Gallagher, K. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it . Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

When I first selected this topic for my action research project we were looking at how we could improve reading comprehension to ensure college readiness.  As I went through my data and looked at the problems we had with our test scores, I felt the need to change my approach and not look at the college readiness part yet, but to find a way to improve reading comprehension for all of the students in our high school.  My wife is an English teacher at the high school with me, so we have taken on this project and we have started implementing some of these strategies in our classrooms already.  She agreed to help me get these ideas in the classroom for our students to start learning in the hopes that we can make a difference in our student’s lives.

Articulate the Vision

This was an easy sell to the Principal at the High School and the Superintendent.  The last few years we were always looking at ways to improve our test scores.  We tried many different ideas on improving scores, especially in Math and Science while not addressing the other core areas because math and science were always the lowest scores. When I visited with my site supervisor, who is also the High School principal, the problem of reading comprehension jumped out at us.  The more we discussed the issue and how to approach it, the more we realized that reading comprehension is the key to all test scores.  Students today feel like they understand what they are reading and the assume that know what certain words mean. Looking at test scores, it is evident that they do in fact struggle with comprehension.  After much discussion with the Principal, I approached our Superintendent about the idea for this study.  I have talked to many of our teachers at all three levels (Elementary, Jr. High, and High School) and all of them have agreed this is a project that our district needs.  I have visited with parents and community members to elicit their responses about views on the ability of our students to comprehend the meaning of words.  I explained to them that my goal is to implement new strategies that would benefit our students and help them to master reading comprehension on a variety of texts at increasing difficult levels.