Affecting Student Growth in Reading Through Text Structure Strategy Intervention
Abstract
quality of life could decline from the lack, a negative mindset, or both. Therefore, educational stakeholders aiding students with reading struggles must find the most effective solutions for these students. Students achieving below-average on reading assessments need appropriate, evidence-based intervention, effective when founded in research, consistent, systematic, and administered by a well-trained, collaborative staff; however, most practices for helping students meet these criteria center on the needs of younger students.
Educators use instructional interventions integrated into their lessons as one effective method for addressing student needs, but it is hard to find the most appropriate intervention. For this record of study, I employed a mixed-methods action research design to explore the impact of the Text Structure Strategy (TSS), an instructional intervention, on student reading comprehension for a participant sample of 111 students. I sought to provide educators with a reasonable, evidence-based, instructional alternative to computerized intervention programs when supporting struggling readers. In this study, students completed an eight-question pre- and posttest to measure reading comprehension before and after the intervention. The exams included five quantitative questions on the assessments, which measured student skills in vocabulary, author’s purpose, inference, author’s craft, and reading comprehension. In evaluating student skills further, performance tasks on each exam assessed student comprehension in three areas: Main idea, summary, and inferencing. A paired t-test analyzing the multiple-choice quantitative data demonstrated the impact of the intervention on student skills. Quantitative analysis of the performance tasks using a holistic rubric characterized students’ reading comprehension significantly grew post-intervention, while qualitative analysis of these tasks using deductive, a priori coding showed how student use of textual cues changed post-intervention. Results indicate the instructional intervention positively impacted student reading comprehension and relevant skills. Secondary educators with students struggling to achieve on reading assessments can integrate this intervention into their lessons to provide students with the instruction they need. To help teachers and learning leaders in my context, I created and distributed a handout overview with information on the purpose and steps to this strategy.
Citation
Hughes, Ashton (2022). Affecting Student Growth in Reading Through Text Structure Strategy Intervention. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /197937.