Instruction for struggling adolescent readers and the limited influence of curriculum materials
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- While many adolescents struggle to meet the literacy demands of high school, teachers in secondary schools are typically not prepared to teach reading. Districts respond to these challenges by adopting packaged reading intervention programs, sets of curriculum materials for courses aimed at quickly developing students' reading abilities. Typically, these programs are meant to be implemented "with fidelity, " or with little change from the designed lessons, but past research questions both the likelihood and the appropriateness of "implementing with fidelity." This case study examines three high school teachers' use of one such program with the goal of describing the sorts of adaptations teachers commonly made and determining the degree to which those adaptations could be explained by how teachers read the curriculum materials and how they conceptualized reading instruction. Data included curriculum materials, classroom observations, and teacher interviews. Although the participating teachers were enthusiastic about the program, each of them made substantial adaptations during planning and implementation. This was partially explained by teachers attending more closely to the student materials than to the accompanying instructional recommendations and by teachers' apparent unfamiliarity with instructional practices promoted by the program. Each teacher's adaptations tended to shift the mode of classroom instruction away from explicit instruction and discussion towards recitation and written work. The shifts also tended to lower the rigor of the academic work from comprehension tasks to memory and procedural tasks. This study illustrates the limits of a written curriculum's influence on instruction and has implications for efforts to improve practice through the adoption of materials.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Brown, Michelle Tracie |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Grossman, Pamela L. (Pamela Lynn), 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Grossman, Pamela L. (Pamela Lynn), 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Borko, Hilda |
| Thesis advisor | Juel, Connie |
| Thesis advisor | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
| Advisor | Borko, Hilda |
| Advisor | Juel, Connie |
| Advisor | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Michelle Tracie Brown. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Michelle Tracie Brown
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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