Providing grade one students with multiple spelling strategies: Comparisons between strategy instruction,strategy instruction with metacognitive information,and traditional language arts

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether providing first-grade students with multiple strategy instruction plus metacognitive information would improve their spelling performances relative to providing them with strategy instruction or traditional language arts activities alone. Students in the strategy conditions received explicit instruction in the use of phonetics, imagery, and analogy. Students in the strategy condition with metacognitive information were also provided with information about when and where to use each spelling strategy. The remaining students completed traditional language arts activities. Students' spelling performances were assessed prior to, immediately after and 14 days after instruction using a dictation test, the Developmental Spelling Test, and a writing sample. For the dictation test, students who received multiple strategy instruction with metacognitive information out-performed those who received strategy instruction alone or completed language arts activities, with no differences between students' performances in the latter conditions. All students' performances improved on the Developmental Spelling Test and writing samples as a function of time. The authors concluded that even young students are able to acquire a repertoire of effective spelling strategies if they are provided with explicit instruction that includes metacognitive information.     

Beginning Teachers' Use of Resources to Enact and Learn from Ambitious Instruction

I investigated how five first-year teachers—all peers from the same science methods class framed around ambitious instruction—used resources to plan and learn in schools that promoted pedagogy anchored around information delivery. The participants engaged in different cycles of resource-driven learning based on the instructional framework they readily enacted. Three participants who enacted ambitious instruction created generative cycles, and two participants who engaged in delivery pedagogy limited their learning in narrowing cycles. Regardless of the learning cycles, students' science ideas became the core resource for each participant. However, the participants who readily enacted ambitious instruction used students' ideas in conjunction with other prioritized resources including “face-to-face” tools, planning tools, and high-leverage practices. The participants who engaged in delivery pedagogy used students' ideas along with resources valued in their school contexts, such as knowledge-embedded tools (textbooks and curricula) and department norms for teaching.     

THE EFFECTS OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATCH AND CONTENT OVERLAP ON GENERALIZED READING PERFORMANCE

This study examined the effects of instructional match and content overlap on students' ability to generalize from passage reading instruction. Four students with mild disabilities served as participants. Using a multielement design, students were instructed with passages at two levels of text difficulty (instructionally matched vs. instructionally mismatched), and generalization was assessed with passages at two levels of similarity to those instructed (low vs. high content overlap). Results indicated that students' oral reading accuracy and fluency showed the greatest degree of generalization when instructional materials were matched to the students' skill level and assessment materials were similar to those used during instruction. Moreover, these results were maintained at 1-month follow-up. The implications of these findings for classroom reading instruction and the assessment of students' reading skills are discussed.     

Knowledge in transition: Adults' developing understanding of a principle of physical causality

What are the conditions that make it likely that cognitive change will occur? We investigate this issue with respect to 25 college students' developing understanding of gear movement (a particular problem in the domain of physical causation). The participants solved problems, then received minimal instruction, and solved additional problems. Significantly, only some of the participants changed their approach to solving the problems after receiving instruction; the remainder of the participants were stable in their understanding and either continued to solve all problems correctly or continued to solve key problems incorrectly. Most analyses focused on the participants who began by solving problems incorrectly. In particular, we attempted to differentiate those participants who exhibited cognitive change from those who did not. To do this, we examined precursors of knowledge change that were motivated by different theoretical positions on mechanisms of cognitive change and development (i.e., consideration of multiple approaches, cognitive conflict, and instruction as an example of a sociocultural process). Results suggest that having multiple approaches available and using instructional information to build on not-well-developed conceptions are likely candidates for understanding knowledge change for adult participants with respect to their developing understanding of physical causality.     

Changes in Academic Engaged Time as a Function of Assessment and Special Education Intervention

Four students were observed systematically at the time when they were referred to special education, and again one month and two months after placement in special education, to examine changes in the nature of instruction received and the students' academic responding times as a function of special education intervention. At each observation time, data were recorded for two full school days on 11 instructional variables and 19 student response variables in 10-second intervals. Considerable variability was evident among students in the amount of time accademic instruction was allocated to them and in the amount of time in which they engaged in academic responding. Changes in instruction and student responding as a function of special education intervention were inconsistent across students. Implications for special education policies are discussed.     

THE EFFECTS OF NARRATIVE AND EXPOSITORY ORGANIZATIONAL INSTRUCTION ON SIXTH‐GRADE CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION OF EXPOSITORY AND NARRATIVE PROSE

Fifty‐six sixth‐grade students were randomly assigned to four instructional groups. These groups were defined by crossing two levels of instruction, organizational and traditional, with two levels of text type, expository and narrative. After four days of instruction the members of each group were randomly assigned to the eight testing conditions which were defined by three factors, instruction (organizational, traditional), text type (narrative or expository), organization (intact, scrambled). Students read passages, answered multiple choice questions, and wrote summaries of the passage. Results indicated that the students who received the organizational instruction wrote better summaries than students who received traditional instruction.     

Using assessment to individualize early mathematics instruction

Accumulating evidence suggests that assessment-informed personalized instruction, tailored to students' individual skills and abilities, is more effective than more one-size-fits-all approaches. In this study, we evaluate the efficacy of Individualizing Student Instruction in Mathematics (ISI-Math) compared to Reading (ISI-Reading) where classrooms were randomly assigned to ISI-Math or ISI-Reading. The literature on child characteristics X instruction or skill X treatment interaction effects point to the complexities of tailoring instruction for individual students who present with constellations of skills. Second graders received mathematics instruction in small flexible learning groups based on their assessed learning needs. Results of the study (n = 32 teachers, 370 students) revealed significant treatment effects on standardized mathematics assessments. With effect sizes (d) of 0.41–0.60, we show that we can significantly improve 2nd graders' mathematics achievement, including for children living in poverty, by using assessment data to individualize the mathematics instruction they receive. The instructional regime, ISI-Math, was implemented by regular classroom teachers and it led to about a 4-month achievement advantage on standardized mathematics tests when compared to students in control classrooms. These results were realized within one school year. Moreover, treatment effects were the same regardless of school-level poverty and students' gender, initial mathematics or vocabulary scores.     

Fostering learning from instructional video in a second language

This study investigated the most effective way to present an instructional video that contains words in the students' second language. Korean‐speaking university students received a 16‐min video lesson on Antarctica that included English narration (video + narration group), English text subtitles (video + text group), or English narration with simultaneous text subtitles (video + narration + text group). On a comprehension test, the video + text group scored higher than each of the other two groups, in contrast to the modality effect; and the video + narration + text group outscored the video + narration group, in contrast to the redundancy effect. Each of the lessons that included text was rated as less difficult than the lesson with narration only. The narration + text group reported lower effort than each of the other groups. Results highlight boundary conditions for two principles of multimedia instructional design that apply for college students who are learning in a second language. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

An effective metacognitive strategy: learning by doing and explaining with a computer‐based Cognitive Tutor

Recent studies have shown that self‐explanation is an effective metacognitive strategy, but how can it be leveraged to improve students' learning in actual classrooms? How do instructional treatments that emphasizes self‐explanation affect students' learning, as compared to other instructional treatments? We investigated whether self‐explanation can be scaffolded effectively in a classroom environment using a Cognitive Tutor, which is intelligent instructional software that supports guided learning by doing. In two classroom experiments, we found that students who explained their steps during problem‐solving practice with a Cognitive Tutor learned with greater understanding compared to students who did not explain steps. The explainers better explained their solutions steps and were more successful on transfer problems. We interpret these results as follows: By engaging in explanation, students acquired better‐integrated visual and verbal declarative knowledge and acquired less shallow procedural knowledge. The research demonstrates that the benefits of self‐explanation can be achieved in a relatively simple computer‐based approach that scales well for classroom use.     

Social emotional learning (SEL) practices in schools: Effects on perceptions of bullying victimization

The direct and indirect effects of student perceptions of the extent to which social emotional learning (SEL) instruction is provided on bullying at school and student victimization experiences were examined for 2832 public school students. Students in grades 4–12 completed several subscales of the Delaware School Climate Survey (Bear et al., 2016) at a single timepoint to assess their perceptions of the extent to which SEL instruction is used at their school, their own SEL skills, bullying at school, and personal victimization experiences. Structural equation modeling revealed that students' perceptions of SEL instruction were inversely related to their perceptions of bullying at school and students' personal experiences of victimization. Effects were direct and indirect, through students' self-reported perceptions of their SEL skills. Effects were stronger in late elementary and middle school than in high school. The indirect effects of student perceptions of the extent of SEL instruction on perceived bullying at school through students' SEL skills varied as a function of victimization severity. For students with low self-reported victimization, there was a negative relation between student self-reported SEL skills and perceptions of bullying at school. In contrast, for students who reported experiencing high levels of victimization, students' self-reported SEL skills related positively to perceptions of bullying at school; there was no significant relation between SEL skills and perceptions of bullying at school for students who reported moderate levels of victimization. Implications for teachers' inclusion of SEL instruction and its effects on positive youth development are discussed.     

Toward the Development of Socio-Metacognitive Expertise: An Approach to Developing Collaborative Competence

We proposed and evaluated an instructional framework for increasing students' ability to understand and regulate collaborative interactions called Co-Regulated Collaborative Learning (CRCL). In this instantiation of CRCL, models of collaborative competence were articulated through a set of socio-metacognitive roles. Our population consisted of 28 students from one urban classroom taking part in an 11-week science unit. Our research questions focused on examining the extent to which students understood and used the roles as intended to regulate collaborative interactions to address group process problems. Mixed-methods analysis of collaborative work sessions determined that (a) students generally understood the language and purpose of the roles, (b) students frequently used and accepted the roles to monitor and regulate activity, and (c) students' ability to use the roles to monitor and regulate activity improved over time. This paper contributes to our understanding of socio-metacognition and trade-offs associated to its development in classroom settings.     

Student Inquiry in a Physics Class Discussion

There is a long, rich history of arguments for the importance of involving students in a process of inquiry. For many instructors, however, promoting student inquiry is a difficult agenda to pursue for two reasons. First, there is often tension for instructors between concerns for this agenda and more traditional concerns for the correctness and completeness of students' understanding. Second, it is not easy to recognize when productive student inquiry is taking place. For a teacher in class, what is valuable about the students' participation at any given moment may not be as obvious as what is flawed and ambiguous in their arguments. For this article, I analyze a short excerpt from a high school physics class discussion to consider the value of the students' work as inquiry and to illustrate a teacher's negotiation of the tension between inquiry and traditional content-oriented concerns. In this way, I try to discover the beginnings of science in what the students say and do, rather than to apply criteria from a particular model of scientific reasoning. This exploration for students' knowledge and abilities is offered both as an approach to research on student inquiry and as a mode of instructional practice to support that inquiry.     

An investigation of high school social studies teachers' understandings of vocabulary teaching and learning

This qualitative study focused on high school social studies teachers' understandings of and perspectives about vocabulary acquisition and instruction. The research questions were the following: (1) What do high school social studies teachers understand about vocabulary instruction? and (2) How do high school social studies teachers support vocabulary learning? Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 25 high school social studies teachers. Findings indicate that external factors shaped instructional decision-making for teaching vocabulary, teachers' belief systems guided instructional choices, and the diverse needs of students called for differentiated instruction not only for English language learners but also for all students given the unique nature of the language of social studies.     

Contexts as switchmen: The variable effects of formal and informal instructional strategies on student achievement

This study presents an exploratory theoretical framework that analyzes the extent by which the contexts of classroom instruction mediate the effects of instructional strategies on achievement. The study first presents the two main tasks that teachers face in classrooms-teaching, and controlling the social order. The study then elaborates on formal and informal instructional strategies that teachers use to manage these tasks. The main foci of the study is to show that the effects of these different instructional strategies on student achievements vary by grade level. The results suggest that the contexts of instruction determine the magnitude and direction of the effects of instructional strategies on achievement. Positive effects on student achievement appear when a functional congruence occurs between teachers' instructional strategies and the contexts wherein they are used. The analyses suggest that changes in the cognitive, social, and institutional contexts of classrooms may change the relative efficacy of specific instructional strategies. Consequently, researchers should pay more attention to the changes in the sociology of classrooms during students' school careers.     

Instruction,Understanding, and Skill in Multidigit Addition and Subtraction

We traced the emerging relations between children's understanding of multidigit numbers and their computational skill and investigated how instruction influenced these relations. We followed about 70 children over the first 3 years of school while they were learning about place value and multidigit addition and subtraction in 2 different instructional environments. By interviewing the students several times each year, we found that understanding and skill were closely related on tasks for which students had not yet received instruction as well as on more difficult tasks even after instruction. Students appeared to apply specific understandings to invent new procedures and modify old ones. The alternative instruction, which encouraged students to develop their own procedures and to make sense of procedures presented by others, appeared to facilitate higher levels of understanding and closer connections between understanding and skill.     

What spelling tells us about the orthographic development and word study instruction with emergent bilingual secondary students

Educators need ways to assess orthographic knowledge and differentiate word study instruction for secondary, emergent bilingual learners. In this study, the spelling of 199 students in grades 7–12 across eight features and four spelling stages was examined to understand students' orthographic development; all but two were learning Spanish and English. Spelling data were collected three times over a nine-month period. There were significant changes across the time periods that show students progressing across four stages of spelling development, with a large effect size (partial eta squared = .498). Data from a standardized assessment of language proficiency were examined to study the relationship between students' orthographic knowledge and their language scores. This study suggests ways to use spelling assessments to plan differentiated vocabulary and word study instruction.     

Instruction in developmental psychology and its influence on self-concept

This study was designed to explore the influence of a unit of instruction in developmental psychology upon the self-concept and academic achievement of 13-year-old adolescents. Participants were 82 junior high school students in British Columbia. Forty-three students received ten 45-minute instructional sessions dealing with the principles of adolescent development; 39 students served as a control group. It was concluded that the unit of instruction did not significantly improve self-concept. The short duration of treatment was identified as the most probable factor in the failure to achieve change. A positive relationship was established between the achievement scores on the knowledge test of developmental psychology and self-concept.