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UB researchers to apply strategies to improve reading, writing in Buffalo schools
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
James L. Collins, professor of learning and instruction in the Graduate School of Education, has, over the course of his 35-year career, developed many writing strategies to help children who struggle with reading improve both their reading comprehension and writing skills.
Over the next three years, Buffalo school children will help Collins put some new theories to the test. He is principal investigator for a study that will test a methodology he calls "Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension" (WIRC). The study will be funded by a $1.5 million 2004 Reading Comprehension and Reading Upscale Grant from the U. S. Department of Education (DOE) Institute for Education Science (IES).
Jaekyung Lee, assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, School and Educational Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, will co-direct the study and serve as research designer and statistical analyst. The research team also will include administrators, coordinators and teachers from the Buffalo Public Schools and the Western New York School Support Center at Erie 1 BOCES.
WIRC, which will be tested with fourth- and fifth-grade students in selected Buffalo Public Schools, challenges conventional assumptions about why some students do poorly on certain reading-comprehension tests. The study will explore the effect that purposeful, integrated reading and writing instruction has on reading comprehension and writing performance.
Traditionally, reading and writing are taught as discrete skills, but Collins says his experience indicates that the integration of reading and writing instruction is very important from an early age to insure that children fully understand what they read.
Like most educators, he says he knows that children who struggle to comprehend written material also have problems using writing to make sense of their reading materials. This is an enormous problem for such readers, he says, since high-stakes assessments and ordinary school assignments require them to write about texts they read.
A common practice in early reading instruction, especially for children having difficulty, he says, is to withhold writing practice until reading skills have had a chance to develop. Collins advocates the opposite—he wants teachers to use writing to promote reading comprehension.
"It is my theory and experience," he says, "that the ability to write about texts contributes to reading comprehension, as well as benefits from it."
The Collins-Lee grant is one of 12 to be awarded nationwide over the next three weeks by the IES, which has not yet announced the total amount of money it will dispense.
A spokesperson for IES says the overarching goal of the institute's reading research program is to develop strategies that will improve the reading comprehension skills and reading outcomes of struggling readers in schools throughout the country.
Grant recipients, including Collins and Lee, assist in this endeavor by developing and evaluating specific interventions that address the underlying causes of reading comprehension problems. They also will develop and test assessment tools for instructional settings that can identify causes of comprehension difficulties.
"Many tests of reading comprehension ask students to write about a text they have just read," Collins says. "As classroom teacher and researcher, I've found that students who are able to use writing to make sense of these texts tend to score higher on the tests. Students with an underdeveloped ability to use writing in this way come up with lower scores.
"The evidence also suggests that those who design these tests and the students who take them presume reading and writing to be separate activities," Collins says. "Reading text may be the first thing test-takers do before answering questions, but comprehension and writing occur together and co-constructively.
"Look at adults at important meetings," he says, "and you see them with papers spread out and pencils or keyboards in hand. They don't 'read now and write later,' as we so often ask kids to do in school. Instead, they use writing to help build an understanding of the ideas they're looking at and discussing."
There is also, he says, a conventional assumption that holds that high-scoring students are simply more "talented" and therefore successful when they use writing to express an understanding of their reading. Collins disagrees.
He argues that, like the adults mentioned above, elementary school students—those with high and low scores on comprehension tests—use writing instrumentally to construct and clarify an understanding of their reading. High-scoring students, however, have more highly developed skills in this area.
Collins notes that high-scoring responses to reading-comprehension tasks generally present relatively full, organized and interesting answers, while low-scoring answers use information minimally, far from the extent necessary to form a skilled argument.
"Writing about reading, however," Collins maintains, "is not a general talent responsible for high test scores, but rather a particular skill that we believe is highly teachable in school."
Such an integrated instructional approach will be at the core of the curriculum the research team will design and test during the study.
The project will integrate reading and writing by creating the need for using them as tools of understanding, and it will make this an inviting necessity by assisting students with problems they encounter. Thus, the research study will design integrated reading and writing activities, and provide them to students, including struggling comprehenders, in supportive ways.
Collins and Lee call the method Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension because it emphasizes work (hence the acronym WIRC) that places writing in the service of reading comprehension.
The IES program that will fund the Collins-Lee study aims to develop evidence about the effectiveness of reading interventions. The long-term outcome of this grant program will be the development of an array of tools and strategies, such as assessments and instructional approaches, documented as effective in improving reading comprehension.
Collins points out that teachers already are using many of the techniques and strategies to be included in the funded research, including discussions called "reciprocal teaching dialogues."
"This strategy asks students to take turns teaching each other by sharing and talking about their reading. It's a short leap from there to having them also discuss the writing they've done about their reading."