Inspiring students to love to read. That was the beginning.
My initial driving question during my first semester in the Innovative Learning program was to explore the impact of free, voluntary reading - commonly known as pleasure reading - on reading proficiency in middle school students. In my teaching context the students receive very little face time with a teacher, so I wondered if increasing the volume of required pleasure reading might be a simple way to increase my students’ reading ability. My literature review of previous research over the decades supported the supposition that the more a person reads, the better they are at reading. Test scores on a national level indicated that students who read more scored higher on reading performance assessments.
The results of my action research showed me that increasing pleasure reading time as a single factor was not as effective as it should have been. One hypothesis as to why my results varied so drastically from the results I found in my literature reviews is that my population has specific qualities and needs. I needed to continue to analyze my students in order to determine my next steps.
Using the SITE model helps understand these learners. My student population is about 65% special needs or at-risk. Many of them face significant obstacles to reading proficiency. Some have never mastered learning to read, yet they are at the stage in school and life where they need to read to learn. Here the idea of mediacy enters. Mediacy is described by Paul Strassmann as, "the ability of individuals to successfully cope with communications in their civilization." Literacy and mediacy working together can help them succeed.
Another significant obstacle for my students are affective (emotional domain) perceptions. Anxiety, depression, frustration from learning difficulties often color their perception of school in general and of learning tasks. In the SITE model, paying attention to these influences would be understanding their sociocultural motives and values. As Baggio notes, positive graphics can be a powerful tool to influence the affective perceptions of students. Enter the SITE model’s technical subcontext. Digital resources could be used to support their reading. Use digital tools to help the student take away obstacles and connect to reading and to other readers. Provide experiences where students get invested in their reading choices in the hopes that they continue to be invested in choosing books of interest and therefore continue reading in general. At this point in my project, my driving question became:
“How can teachers leverage digital resources to support reading success for at-risk & special needs students?”
Read more about the evolution of my research and my driving question on the RESEARCH page.