Students’ Higher-level Text Comprehension Skills and their Teachers’ Preferences for Teaching Methods
Submitted by:
Triinu Kärbla
Abstract:
Text comprehension is a process that is influenced by several factors, as students’ reading and cognitive skills (Angosto, Sánchez, Álvarez, Cuevas, & León, 2013), as well as teachers’ teaching methods (Mayer, 2002). The aim of current longitudinal study was to examine students’ analysing and evaluative skills and their change with teachers’ preferences for instructional methods. Six-hundred-and-six students and their Estonian language teachers (N = 39) were tested in Grade 4 and in Grade 5. Variable- and person-oriented approaches were employed to discover differences in the whole sample and patterns of individual level groups (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007; von Eye, 1990 ). On the variable level, students can analyse the text better than evaluate it in both grades. On the individual level, students with varying comprehension growth were found. There were students whose evaluative skills were even better than analysing skills. Thus, lower level skills do not always have to precede the higher level comprehension skills. More precisely, students’ evaluative skills were better if their teachers combined traditional methods with constructivist. To enhance students’ evaluative skills, more conscious choices are expected from teachers.
References
Angosto, A., Sánchez, P., Álvarez, M., Cuevas, I., & León, J. A. (2013). Evidence for top-down processing in reading comprehension of children. Psicologia Educativa, 19, 83–88.
Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison K. (2007). Research metods in education. 6th ed London:Routledge.
Mayer, R. E. (2002). Traditional versus meaningful learning. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 226–232.
von Eye, A. (2000). Introduction to Configural Frequency Analysis. The Search for Types and Antitypes in Cross-Classifications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.