Analysis of Data
Analysis of Students’ Change
Text comprehension occurs at many different levels for many different reasons whether it is literal, inferential, or due to of prior knowledge, or due to the stance that was taken as the text was read. It can occur as a result of a personal or private reading or as a consequence of group discussion during or after reading. Each of the three assessments in this study measured comprehension and text understanding from a very different perspective. Although the formal assessments did not indicate a major change in comprehension scores, sometimes the growth that occurs just isn’t measurable through those types of forums.
The noteworthy growth in this study was observed during the intervention sessions and documented during a review of the audio tapes of those sessions. The students were encouraged to develop a more critical stance as they questioned the purpose and fallibility of the author in each selection. Their changing responses over the sessions indicated a shift from a literal to inferential interpretation as they became actively engaged with the text and sought alternative explanations to interpret the message that the author was trying to convey. The participants did this in a variety of ways, some of which involved making more text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections as they explicitly questioned the author’s purpose, thinking, and format. They began to make more predictions and asked for fewer clarifications as they started to wonder about different possibilities and construct meaning in a deeper, more meaningful way.
When the participants were presented with informational text, the queries and instructional moves used guided them to be very critical of the author’s style and presentation of the material. They discussed the format of the material, the confusion it caused them, and also made suggestions on how they would have written the selection if they were the author. The poetry selection was teeming with figurative language and very difficult to interpret. Interestingly they did not question the author’s purpose or fallibility, rather they were intent upon making sense of each individual segment that was read, and how that segment fit into the whole picture. Conversely, during one of the fiction selections, they began to comment upon the predictability of the selection, and how the author was beginning to bore them.
Participation in this study undoubtedly gave the students a new strategy to help them deal more effectively with text as they read. More importantly, though, the strategy of Questioning the Author (QtA) exposed each of them to logical sequences of questions which developed their individual critical thinking skills, thus facilitating their ability to build text coherence and background knowledge to enhance their comprehension and afford them a deeper meaning of the text.
