Research
2009-2010 Funded Project
The Role of Identity in Reading Comprehension Development
In collaboration with staff and students AL Stanback Middle School (Orange County Schools), Dr. Leigh Hall is examining and refining an instructional framework intended to help middle school teachers create instruction that responds to students’ identities as readers and helps students learn the skills they need to be successful readers. Goals for the project include examining and positively changing student involvement with classroom reading practices, increasing student reading comprehension abilities, and allowing students to progress in who they want to become as readers.
The project uses a formative design approach in order to achieve three pedagogical goals with middle school students: (a) examine and positively change their involvement with classroom reading practices, (b) increase their reading comprehension abilities, and (c) allow them to progress in who they want to become as readers. In addition to examining how well the project achieved its pedagogical goals, formative designs also address the following questions:
- What factors contribute to or inhibit the success of the project?
- How can the project be modified during and after the school year in order to more effectively achieve its goals?
- How does the classroom environment change as a result of the project?
- What unanticipated effects occur as a result of the project?
Students will engage in identity-based reading practices to help them achieve the three pedagogical goals. Identity-based reading practices are intended to connect reading instruction with students’ current and future identities as readers and have the following components:
- Making identity explicit. One teacher and her students will explore how people get identified as being good or poor readers within different settings (school, at home, in their community, in the texts they read), decide what they think it means to be a reader, and explore different reading identities. As social and cultural norms are made visible, participants can collectively decide the extent to which such norms should be valued within their classroom and may reframe their understandings of what it means to be a reader.
- Developing new reading identities. Students will examine how they currently identify themselves as readers and how they want to be identified as readers in the future. They will set goals for how their new reading identities might be achieved. Students will compose written reflections on their goals monthly and explore what is helping or preventing them from moving forward.
- Connecting instruction. Reading instruction and assignments will be designed to help students achieve their reading identities. The teacher will explain to the students how the instruction/assignments can help them achieve their identity as readers. Students’ reflections will be used to inform the instruction.
This project will promote an instructional model that ensures students with reading difficulties receive equitable, appropriate, and excellent instruction that allows them to be successful in school. Additionally, this project is field-based and allows for collaboration to be developed between the researcher, teacher and students.
