My driving question is; How does technology affect bilingual student engagement with reading comprehension?
I have been teaching for 4 years now and it seems that every year students struggle in the same area, reading comprehension. I have done kindergarten and third grade and even though reading comprehension looks different in 3rd grade than in kindergarten, they are still struggling. My current 3rd grade class is composed of 13 English Learners and 10 English Only. My students have to pass weekly reading comprehension tests in English and in Spanish. I have been noticing that some of my students have trouble passing theses tests and I think it’s because they are not interested in reading the stories. If they are EO’s and it’s Spanish week they don’t seem as interested in the story, and if it’s English week then some of my ELs struggle to make connections. Thus I need to find some way to get them engaged so that they can improve their reading comprehension scores regardless of the language. I want to find a technology piece to use that will engage my students in both languages. Looking at the various state and nation test scores in ELA students are making minimal progress and some are even decreasing their scores. International/National, state achievement (NAEP, CAASPP): The National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for reading shows that there has not been much growth in 4th and 8th graders in 2015 scores compared to 2013 reading scores. In fact 8th grade scores from 2015 have dropped compared to 2013. The results show that the following group of 8th graders dropped their scores: males, females, white, black, hispanic, suburb, town, rural. It seems that almost all 8th graders regardless what ethnicity or where they live have dropped their reading scores. Both grades have only gained a small amount of points from the first ever scores in 1992 (6 points for 4th grade and 5 points for 8th grade). In 23 years our 4th and 8th graders have only gained 6 points in reading comprehension scores since first implementing this tests. According to the CAASPP English Language Arts/ Literacy reports in the sate students scores from 2017 have slightly increased from the 2016 scores. In 3rd and 4th grade their scores combined increased 1.96%, in 5th and 6th grade their scores combined dropped by 3.43%, and in 7th, 8th, and 11th grade their scores combined increased by 2.77% compared to 2016 scores (https://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr17/yr17rel67a.asp). Thus there was a slight 1.30% increase in total from all grades 2017 scores compared to 2016.Looking at the smarter balanced test results for my district, Vacaville USD, our student’s English Language Arts scores of student meeting or exceeding the English standard in 2017 have increased 0.32% from the 2016 scores. My school, Edwin Markham, has increased their number of students meeting or exceeding the standard by 0.97% from last year. So far the information on the articles I have found is very similar to what I plan to do with my action research project. In one of the articles' called “Second-Grade Urban Learners” (Bennett, Jessica G; Gardner, Ralph; Ramnath, Rajiv; Council, Morris R), researchers use different strategies for 4 weeks during intervention to help second grade students achieve benchmark for reading fluency and comprehension. Their research included 8 students that received various technology tools to help with fluency and comprehension. They used computer assisted instruction software such as www.readnaturally.com that had many variables. The software had 1 minute cold read, listening to passages being read to them, read along with computer, comprehension tests with multiple choice and short answer questions. The software also had the capability to listen to students read and the program generated total words read. At the end of the study 5 out of the 8 second graders reached benchmark. So I am hoping that the bilingual technology tool that I will use will help my students improve their reading comprehension test scores.
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/19VuurvtwAIVoE422HWe1WYYPmh_htE8CaZnKnJLzwpg/edit?usp=sharing
Here is the link to my IRB document. |
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