Rationale
History
My capstone project was centered around guided reading groups. The instructional strategies learned in guided reading were implemented during our whole group instruction time. In October 2017, 326 students were enrolled in my building. In 2017-2018, 23% of our student body was characterized as a minority and 18.61% of students qualified for the free and reduced lunch program. Our student body was comprised of families that received Section 8 housing assistance as well as families that would be considered middle class. In our building, 15% of the students are verified in the special education program and 8% were in the High Ability Learner (HAL) program. In my classroom, I had 18 students. One student qualified for special education and three students qualified for the High Ability Learner program. I had four students who were a part of the free and reduced lunch program and three students whose families received Section 8 housing assistance. These demographics indicated a wide range of ability, exposure, and experience in my classroom. Having a variety of abilities across all curricular areas and taking into consideration the reality of life my students faced outside my classroom walls, challenges were created for me to meet all of my students' academic and social and emotional needs.
Need for Study
The data I collected from my students’ current and past assessments showed a need in the area of reading, specifically comprehension. The 5th-grade class ranked 12th out of 15 elementary schools in our district and last in our school array on their Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Reading Test scores. Our array was comprised of five elementary schools in our district with similar demographics. The MAP assessment was taken three times throughout the school year to measure academic progress and growth of students. As an adaptive, norm-referenced assessment, students earn a Rausch Unit (RIT) score, which indicated what they are ready to learn (achievement). In terms of growth, the average RIT score of the 5th-grade cohort was 5.1 points. That growth ranked us 6th out of the 15 elementary schools in our district and 3rd out of the 5 schools in our array. Over the past few years, this class of students slowly declined in their district assessment scores. The cause of this decline is unknown. As a building, it would be beneficial to look back at our instructional practices to help improve our students’ growth and performance on future assessments. In my class, I had three students reading below grade level according to the district’s targeted reading level within the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system. These students struggled with knowing everything from what the genre of text is to have the ability to comprehend what the text is about. According to the fall MAP reading data, my class had a standard deviation of 14.9 (the normal deviation is a range of 10 to 14). Any range under a standard deviation of 14 shows that your class is grasping whole group instruction. As a class, we had four students score below average on the MAP Reading test, four scored at grade level, and eleven students scored above average. This range of scores showed a need for more differentiated instruction within my classroom. The four students who scored below average typically had a low level of engagement in reading class which led to a lack of understanding and practicing reading concepts. This held them back from showing growth as we continuously worked on their comprehension. The common area of weakness for my students was comprehension. When I looked at my class data (MAPs scores and guided reading levels), I realized that I had a wide range of student needs in the area of reading comprehension that needed to be met throughout the year. My lesson plans needed to be strategically planned to allow growth for all students in my class regardless of what level they were currently at.
Importance for Study
The information gained from this study was important because it allowed me to know what my students needed to improve on as readers and allowed me to study new methods to help guide my lesson planning to ensure growth is seen in each of my students, regardless of their range of abilities. This study helped me become a better reading teacher. I was able to utilize the resources within my building and district to help plan my reading lessons. I was able to work diligently with our building reading coach and my team of teachers to help guide my lesson plan ideas. I had access to a guided reading library in my school that had a vast amount of books to engage my students. I was able to gain new insight into the district’s ideal reading format through our professional development meetings that were held routinely in my school. I focused my lessons on what comprehension questions I needed to ask each of my reading groups. As a first year educator, I was not confident in my abilities to create and guide a reading group plan that would help my students be able to grow as a reader and allow me to track data to show their growth. I realized that I needed each question I asked to be well thought out and directed at the student’s zone of proximal development. Performing this study helped my students grow as readers and pushed them to be more engaged as we meet in reading groups each day. Meeting each of my students' needs and differentiating in each of my reading groups helped to work on each student’s areas of weakness. I was able to praise each student and celebrate their successes as we saw their growth from week to week and throughout the year. I hope that as I learn more about how to ask the correct questions and grow as a reading teacher that it will be reflected in my students.
Research
This study sought to determine if the use of differentiated targeted questioning in reading groups will increase student achievement in reading for the nineteen students in my current fifth-grade classroom. Based on standardized testing data, my students scored low in reading growth and overall comprehension throughout their past years in school. My students lack of ability to comprehend texts was concerning and led me to research strategies which could help enhance my students’ comprehension. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in using differentiated targeted questioning to increase reading comprehension. With the Common Core State Standards, the focus on close readings and text dependent questioning has become a large factor within state assessments (Boele, 2016). This careful attention to the text ought to increase comprehension. Questioning students during guided reading is not a new strategy, but its effectiveness is evolving especially in terms of the types of questions teachers are utilizing. In the past, teachers posed questions to assess the mastery of factual knowledge, rather than using questioning to develop critical thinking (Fisher, 2018). Questioning should be used to help students grow in specific areas of reading comprehension such as identifying text features. Furthermore, these questions should be differentiated to address individual student weaknesses (Fisher, 2018). The following literature review seeks to summarize current research about guided reading especially as it relates to targeted questioning in order to provide me with research-based strategies to improve my students’ reading comprehension.