The Development, Documentation, and Evaluation of a Strategy-Training Program for Primary School Students With reading Comprehension Difficulties

Abstract

This research developed from a documented need to enhance the reading skills of students with comprehension difficulties, who despite initial interventions in the early years of schooling, still had reading problems that persisted into high school. The study also responds to the need for more sophisticated programs that effectively facilitate primary children's use of complex reading comprehension strategies, within a tutoring and mentoring framework. The main aim of this research was the development, documentation, and evaluation of the Comprehension of the Narrative tutoring program for primary school students with reading comprehension difficulties. The intervention was based on three theoretical notions. The first, learning is a socially constructed process (Becker & Luthar, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978). The second, student's use of visual imagery connects the reading text to the reader's own experiences and provides a strategy that facilitates recall and comprehension of the text (Eddy & Glass, 1981; Kosslyn, 1976; Romeo, 2002). The third, student's reading comprehension is an outcome of six interactive factors: (1) the historical/cultural context, (2) the social context, (3) the instructional context, (4) the task environment context, (5) the text context, and (6) the reader context (Pearson & Raphael, 1990). The student participants in this research were selected according to their reading achievement scores from whole class screening procedures using the Test of Reading Comprehension TORCH (Mossenson, Hill, & Masters, 1987). Additional information was collected on the students using the Neale Analysis of Reading (1988), the students' attitude to reading survey, the classroom teachers' survey, and students' level of book reading. The 72 participants (male 38 and female 34) were drawn from Years 5 to 7, from a large metropolitan independent coeducational primary school on the Gold Coast, Australia. The tutors were parents who volunteered their time and who were educated and mentored on the strategies and procedures outlined in the Comprehension of the Narrative tutoring program. The results demonstrated that students who participated in the tutoring intervention made significant gains in their reading and comprehension abilities as well as in their attitudes towards reading, compared to their peers in the control group who received no intervention by adult tutors. These intervention-based improvements were maintained over time. This original research documents the effectiveness of four strategic elements that collectively enhanced students' reading performance by utilizing: (1) visual and verbal comprehension strategies, (2) controlled levels of text and task difficulty, (3) systematic metacognitive focused instruction procedures, and (4) well trained and mentored tutors.