Reading Comprehension Strategy for Learning Disabled: Segmenting and summarizing reading assignments for high school students with learning disabilities, ADHD and dyslexia.
By: Karen Yancey M.Ed
In February of 2009, I taught three special education English classes to learning disabled high school students. I had nineteen students some of whom were ADHD, dyslexic and autistic had learning disabilities in reading and reading comprehension. The classes were small and designed to give much individual instruction. Most of the students were economically disadvantaged and considered at-risk for dropping out.
As a result of the reading disabilities, most of my students read at a slower rate and had a low reading endurance. When I gave my students long reading assignments, many of them struggled. I knew that when they started to feel a sense of defeat, they stopped attempting to understand the passage. According to Jay Smink in “Effective Dropout Prevention Strategies for Students with and without Disabilities in Urban Schools,” two common indicators for students leaving school before graduation is low academic achievement and lack of motivation. Smink also states that early interventions to help low-achieving students improve their reading and writing skills are effective at keeping students in school. With the knowledge that people with weak literacy skills are less likely to be able to connect with community resources and be successful at advancing in their careers , I wanted to help my students become prepared for their adult lives.
Also, some of my students could decode the reading quickly but did not understand what they read. According to Joanna Williams in “Improving Comprehension for Students with LD” some learning disabled students can master the mechanics of reading but still not comprehend the passage. Frequently, this problem is not noticed until later grades when comprehension challenges increase (Williams 7)
As a result of these problems, all of my students had not mastered the reading strategies that they needed to know to be able to pass the state standardized test.
One important task I had going into this class was to teach reading and literacy skills that would help them to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills standardized test that is administered yearly in Texas schools. It was only the second year these students had been required to take the TAKS test. Before 2008, special education students in Texas took the Locally Determined Alternate Assessment and the State Developed Alternative Assessment as their annual test.
I knew that according to Joseph Torgesen, learning disabled students must receive instruction that is explicit and systematic. Learning disabled students at the high school level must receive reading instruction that is focused and intensive and our expectations of what is reasonable progress must be adjusted. Some studies make it clear that teachers must be active in guiding students through each step during instruction (Williams 7).
Furthermore, there was one ADHD student in the class and two autistic students. Autism tends to keep the student from being able to process large amounts of information at one time. Autistic students benefit from visual segmenting and organizing the material on the page. Task analysis such as working on one step at a time promotes students success (Redden 4). ADHD students who have difficulty staying focused on a task also benefit by breaking up assignments as it allows them to think reflectively on what they are doing rather than respond with irrelevant answers (Child Development Institute 1).
Possible Solution?
In an effort to come up with a solution to the problem, I postulated that breaking up long reading assignments into smaller ones and making the students process the information they read into a summary sentence for each paragraph would help them understand the meaning of the text in a step by step manner. Then, the student could go back and piece together the meaning of the text by looking at his or her summary sentences. Many reading comprehension strategies are based on summarizing text. The Generating Interaction between Schemata and Text or GIST method puts students in groups that read a passage one paragraph at a time and discuss how to summarize it into one sentence.(Herrell 2).
I examined the available data.The Eighth and Ninth grade Reading TAKS scores from Spring 2008 revealed that the average score for my Freshman Applied English classes showed fifty-eight percent mastery. The average score for my Sophomore Applied English class was lower at twenty-eight percent mastery. Only two students out of eleven students met mastery expectations. These very low scores led me to look further. I then examined two benchmark tests that were given in the fall and winter of the current 2008-2009 school year. Benchmark tests are shortened form of older released TAKS tests that are designed to diagnose performance levels on the actual TAKS test. The average scores for the freshman at 56 and 58 were no better than the TAKS score taken in the spring of 2007-2008. The sophomore averages on the checkpoints only increased by a maximum of thirteen points.
Plan of Action
I decided to implement my thesis into the curriculum of my English classes. I was hoping that my students would view the assignments as achievable and would develop a “can-do” attitude that would aid in the learning process.
I would teach the students how to cut a long reading assignment into paragraph sections and write a one sentence summary of each paragraph on the back of the paper. They had the option of using scissors to literally cut the assignment or to use pencils to draw lines between the paragraphs. If they simply drew lines, I would have the students cover up all of the passage except the paragraph that they were reading.
The students would do a group of three reading comprehension assignments before I taught them the segmentation strategy so I would have some data to compare their later scores. I would calculate the average of the three initial reading assignments. I then taught them how to section their assignments and summarize. I would require them to do ten more reading comprehension assignments using the new strategy.
I had my students complete a pre-reading strategy survey that asked their opinions of reading long assignments. Half of the students indicated that they felt bored or overwhelmed by long reading assignments that would cause them to loose their place, get distracted and “shut-down.” The other half did not feel this way but indicated that they felt using a reading strategy would help them improve their reading comprehension.
The one sentence summaries were intended to help the students recall information and process the information they just read. They then could go back and review the summaries when they were answering the reading comprehension questions. The process of breaking the reading assignments into sections was intended to help reduce anxiety in the students, help them stay focused and to increase reading comprehension.
Proving a need:
The students completed a group of three simple reading comprehension assignments at the beginning of the fifth six weeks. At that time, they were not using the reading strategy. This data was collected to indicate the need for more targeted reading comprehension instruction. Assignment 1 was a simple summary assignment, Assignment 2 was a reading for meaning assignment and Assignment 3 tested inferencing. Most did well on the first, about half of the students passed the second and very few passed the inferencing activity.
The low grades on the classroom assignments indicated that the low test scores were not just the result of testing anxiety nor did many of the student have decoding problems. The student could read the words in the passage. However, they could not understand the message that the sentences were trying to convey.
Collection of the Original Data:
I gave a total of ten reading comprehension assignments over two weeks. I also ensured that the assignments were similar to material encountered on the TAKS test and that it was of high interest to the students.
The assignments consisted of several short stories about children of high school
age. Some were anecdotal and some were exposition pieces. I also included pieces with dialogue which are usually present in stories on the TAKS test.
It took my students three times of using the segmentation strategy to fully understand the process of reading and writing a one sentence summary for each paragraph.
At the end of each week of reading practice, I showed each student their grade trends to let them know if he or she was improving.
At the end of the two week practice period, a final checkpoint test was given to determine if the reading strategy would benefit the students during testing. Table 5 shows the results:
• Sixty-eight percent of the students showed an increased score on the final checkpoint.
• Fifty-eight percent of the students showed an increased score of at least ten points.
• Thirty-one percent of the students showed an increased score of at least twenty points.
The sophomores showed significantly more progress than the freshmen. The sophomore grades increased by an average of 25 points. The freshman increased by an average of five points.
Conclusions:
It is clear from the assignment data and checkpoint data that the sophomores benefited most from this strategy. However, it is important to note that the sophomores started out with lower grades than the freshman. Another explanation is that 2009 was only the second year all special education students were required to take the TAKS test.
The post reading strategy survey indicated that eighty percent of the students felt segmenting the reading helped them remember what they read and helped them keep track of where they were in the passage. Eighty percent said that writing the one sentence summaries helped them understand the passage better. But only fifty percent of the students said that the strategy made them feel more willing to complete the assignment. From this I can conclude that the strategy is helpful for reading comprehension but it does not always make the overall activity seem easier to the student.
The summary strategy did not seem to help some of the students to identify the context clues that help a reader understand an unknown word. Many of my students did not have large vocabularies so they struggled when the stories were about unfamiliar topics. In this case, texts on unfamiliar subjects should be accompanied by a word bank with definitions.
I also noted that several of the students were still interpreting expressions in the reading at a literal level even when they used the summary strategy. These same students had difficulty identifying everyday concepts in unfamiliar story settings. I concluded that this is evidence of a lack of reading practice. With more practice, students can identify concepts that have been integrated into a text or conversely synthesize meaning from a text.
The overall success of this reading strategy implies that this and other close-reading strategies need to be implemented in high school classrooms for the learning disabled on a regular basis. Explicit instruction and repetitive practice in reading comprehension appears to be very effective at helping students be able to recall information they have read.
It is important to note that reading comprehension strategies have not been emphasized in the elementary years and evidence has shown that such strategies help readers understand texts better (Pressley 3 ).
Children who learn more slowly require more repetition. Unfortunately, reading practice varies directly with the severity of a child’s reading disability so the children with a reading disability usually receive only a fraction of the total reading practice nondisabled children receive. However, many teachers are not trained in giving explicit, supportive instruction (Torgesen 6). Early training in reading comprehension skills could benefit students and reduce the need for reading classes at the high school level. For those students who still need reading help at the high school level, specific reading instruction in the form of segmenting texts is effective.
Bibliography
1. Child Development Institute, "Suggested Classroom Interventions for Children with ADD and Learning Disabilities." Child Development Institute. Available from www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/learning/teacher.html. Internet; accessed April 2008.
2. Herrel, Adrienne, Michael Jordan. Fifty Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc., 2004.
3. Pressley, M. "Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon." Reading Online. Available from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/pressley/index.html. Internet; accessed April 2008.
4. Redden Shea. Occupational Therapist, Strategies For Modifying An Assignment, presented during an In-Home Training Workshop at Burleson Independent School District, July 2008.
5. Torgesen, Joseph K.. "Preventing Early Reading Failure." American Educator. Fall 2004, Available: http://www.aft.org/pubsreports/american_educator/issues/fall04/reading.htm
6. Williams, Joanna P.. "Improving Comprehension for Students with LD." Reading Rockets. Available from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/86. Internet; accessed 2 April 2008.
7. Smink, Jay. "Effective Dropout Prevention Strategies for Students with and without Disabilities in Urban Schools." Urban Perspectives 9, no. 2 (2004): 1,4-5,11 Available: http://www.urbancollaborative.org/urbanperspectives/summer04.pdf
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